 Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. Welcome to Fix My Mix. Where are we? Number 27. Oh my lord. Nice to see you here in the chat, folks. I'll say hello to you in a moment and I want to say a big thank you to DistroKid who, as Pete John says, keep the lights on around here. Just in case you don't know, these shows are demonetised. Almost every week, actually. Pretty much every single show gets demonetised by YouTube because there's always some copyright material on there. So thank you to DistroKid for funding this show. We can do it every week. And as I say, keep the lights on around here. We are here today. This is a really, I know I keep saying there's special editions of Fix My Mix, but this is a special, special edition. Because as you know, for the last two or three weeks, I've been doing some hands-on. Yes. And that's been very interesting and very frightening at the same time. And that has meant that I haven't had any guests on the show, right? That was just, that was just too much multitasking for me. But this week we have a kind of a hybrid because I am doing some hands-on mixing of acoustic guitar from my track. But I have a guest. Somebody who can be here to tell me what I'm doing wrong and how they would do it like that. They do it differently because that's what guitarists do. To each other's faces, they're like teenage girls. They're like, oh, wonderful. And then behind the scenes, they're like, oh, I was doing that years ago. I wouldn't play it like that. But anyway, enough about that. Let's say hi to my fellow guitarist who is here, a very popular person on my channel. People often say how much they like having him on the show. And his name is Dan, and he is the lonely rocker. You know, guitar players will give you that look and they'll act like they know what they're talking about, but they don't have a clue. You just got to look stoic and, you know, oh, you didn't take the grommet and put them three degrees off center? Guitars always stand right at the back at gigs, don't they? And they just, they've got their arms folded. It's the lean. It's the lean. The lean, yes. I lean these days just because I'm a little top heavy, but that's about it. You know, when you're making like YouTube videos and things like that, right? And, you know, you haven't got your audience in front of you. So sometimes they say, you know, just imagine your audience. Don't ever imagine other guitar players when you're playing guitar on YouTube. Don't do that. No, just imagine it's your mom or something. You know, one of my best friend, we used to go to shows and I'd always be like, you know, looking and picking things apart. He's like, can't you just enjoy the show? You got to critique everything. That's so true. But anyway, you can do that today, Dan, because I am going to be later on looking or sort of going through how I process acoustic guitar. And I there's almost always acoustic guitar on every single one of my tracks. And over the years, I've kind of developed my way of doing things. You know, and I was thinking about this and I was thinking, would do other people do it like this? I'm not really sure this is how I've how I do it. And this is how you know, there's been layers to this has been gradual things I've decided over the years have worked for me. So it is really fascinating to have you here as a world because I'm going to invite you to first of all, ask me questions or even tell me how you would have done it differently is absolutely. It's cool because I think there's more than one way. What's the phrase to skin a cat? Is it? I'm allergic to cats. Who skins cats? Let's say hi to some of the people in the chat here. Nice to see Dave here. Welcome to the show Dave. We have got Kevin in here. Always nice to see Kevin in here. Always makes a great contribution to the show. We have Pete Johns. I've just been watching Pete Johns over on his channel. You were on there a couple of weeks ago, weren't you Dan? Two or three weeks ago? Yes, I was. That was actually had a really good time on that. I have to say Pete puts on a hell of a show. The guy's a master of the mic and there was a pleasure. He really is, isn't he? Yes. And I do sometimes anonymously slip into his audience just to see what's going on. He did a great interview with Ricky T. He did last week. That was a wonderful interview. Always good stuff over there. Folks, he's usually on the hour before this show every week. So make sure you do check out Studio Live today with Pete Johns over there. Good day to Doug. Nice to see you here, Doug. As usual, helping out with the comments as is Keonra. Also, we have E-Short Sax. Good name, mate. We were chatting about something yesterday in one of my latest videos. E-Short Sax, I think, was saying how he's got all of the sonnable plug-ins. I did a review on sonnable's compressor. Did you see that, Dan? Yes. That's quite a plug-in. Some people are saying it's giving FabFilter a run for its means. Absolutely. I might actually use it later on in the show. We'll see. That's different. Keonra, did I say hi to Keonra? I'm not sure. Lovely to see you all here. The produce aisle is here. We played a song from the produce aisle last week on the show, Dan. What was amazing about it was, first of all, I thought it was a very, very good song and quite a good recording. It had a couple of little tips, but the feedback that Lorraine had got elsewhere for the same song was really, really negative. It's just really interesting that when two different groups of people listen to a song, they come from different biases and what have you and different expectations. I genuinely thought, and I think everyone here thought the song was really great, so thank you for that. Talking about songs, let's have a listen to the first song, or the only song that we're going to be reviewing today, Dan. We don't have enough time to go through lots of them. This is... Let me have you read the name out here, of course. You're making me put on my glasses, right? Marcello Polly, now you will see, as I just did with my glasses. You know, I just realized, because before I forget this, Marcello, we will play a song in a moment, but I'm going to digress for a moment. I just want to share a wide shot of Dan here just to get... Look, he's put some effort into his backdrop today. Dan, I'm noticing some nice things there. I didn't realize you used Yamaha monitors, actually. Yes, the only ones I've ever owned, and I bought them because they looked like NS10s, but they're a good range. Are they fives? They're sevenths. They look quite small from this view, but yeah, okay. Next to my massive studio, yeah, they look kind of small. You've got the acoustic guitar, Taylor, one series you were saying to me. One series here, and then this thing above my head right here, this used to be my pedalboard, and I kept tripping over my pedalboard and realized I didn't need a pedalboard, so I... I don't know if you can see the third row here, but all the pedals that I... I'll have to get rid of the... Not all my pedals, but I figured when tracking... Oh, yeah, look at that. Yeah, so when tracking, I don't need a pedalboard, I just need individual pedals. It's like generally a boost or an overdrive that are sitting on my amp, which is the other side of the camera here, with the power supply and everything that used to be in the board, but then if I'm feeling a flavor, I could just stand in front of the shelf and, you know, take it off, plug it in, and put it back. Good stuff. Anyway, we digressed. We digressed. Let's have a listen. Let's have a listen. We digressed. Yeah, we do that. Let's have a listen to this song from Marcello, as I say, called Now You Will See. Well, that worked me up. Yes. Dan Dan The Man, Baloney Rocker. What did you make of that? Someone said in the comments it said, they think that sounded like the drummer mixed this. That was funny. Yeah, a lot of drums in there. There's no question about that. Well, it's a cool... You know what? I'm developing a bit of a reputation here. Let's start with the positives. It's a cool track. I see someone mentioned Bowie, that sort of almost spoken word-ish, low register kind of vocal. So it definitely has style. A lot of energy to the track. Something closer to the rock genre, which always makes this Lonely Rocker happy, right? And I think there's a lot going on there. So kudos to him for this track, because I think it's pretty cool. Now, in terms of the mix, I think the one word that... A couple of things, balance. I think the balance is completely out of whack. I mean, there's definitely a lot of drums in there. So, I mean, I can say a lot about that. I mean, I was making some notes here. I mean, I think it was obvious the vocals were a little bit too way back in the track. Just getting buried. I mean, the drums were pretty much buried. They're burying everything. You know, it is an energy, high energy track. I'd like to hear a little thump in the bottom end. I wasn't feeling the bass. These have most tend to be pretty bassy. And it wasn't. So that tells me that it's probably even worse than what I'm hearing through my headphones. Guitars. I mean, there's some really cool guitars going on there. I'd like to feel some presence, maybe widen them a little bit. You know, I was kind of feeling it sort of not centered, but maybe just a little bit off. I'd like to bring them really on the outsides, just bring up those guitars and make them feel a bit fatter and wider. And one thing, which is kind of hard to say when we're listening on a stream, is that there was something out of whack with the overall dynamics of the song. It's just like maybe there was a compressor on the master bus pushing a little too hard. It felt brittle, but it was just lacking. It was all, it was kind of like very constant. You know what I mean? I didn't feel, it was a section that sort of, a little lighter section somewhere in the middle or the back half of the song. And it still was up there, you know, it's kind of like we could have brought that down in intensity and then brought the listener back up again would have been nice. Dynamics in terms of performance, but also, you know, in terms of, you know, as we talk about with compression, it just felt very linear all the way through to me. So I'll stop there. Okay, no, there's pretty good input. A lot of it was what I was about to say. To me, the most obvious thing was that the vocals needed to come up. Definitely. And I like the character of the vocals. As I say, you mentioned Bowie, Bowie, depending on how people want to pronounce it. There was an element of Lou Reed about that as well. Think all of that. Think Lou Reed, Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen, all that kind of stuff. It's quite, you know, it's probably a love it or hate it kind of vocal style. But I quite enjoy it. And I just wanted to hear what was being said, you know, with those lyrics. I couldn't hear those lyrics. They were a style of vocal, but not much else. So need those to come up. Maybe it's the drums come down. You know, when we talk about balance, don't always think about pushing things up. Sometimes you need to create space for things. But overall, the one thing I will say about the drums, I really like the drums. The drum performance was just awesome and was powering the track very much. Also, I don't know if you noticed, but there was a really unusual kind of chord progression going on in the sense that I think the verses or the opening part, whether that was the verse or not, was in a major. I was just looking at this quickly early. I think it's in C major or close to it. But then it goes to the chorus, which is like C minor, which is a little bit of an unusual thing. You know, people will go to a relative minor or something like that. So I had this feeling of being sort of not positive, but on that positive line and then dropping to this darker sort of, you know, feeling, which I really enjoyed. It was just a little bit jarring in a nice way, in a really good way, which was really fun. So, you know, queued us on the choice of chords and things going on there as well. But I don't have too much to add, I think I agree with everything sonically that Dan was talking about. It reminds me a lot of me actually when whoever, I mean, it's obvious that there's musicianship in here, and like you said, unconventional chord changes are, instead of going to an obvious relative minor, you know, go from a major to a minor and just something different. When I started recording more seriously, because my music, my songwriting and my ability to play was at a certain level and I figured, well, this will translate into a great production and a great mix because I've been in TV production for years and I realized how much I didn't know. And it was certainly a slap in the face when I was like, why does this sound like garbage, right? I bought the monitors, I bought the interface and I was like, all right, we're going to produce a song and it shows you that mixing is an art into itself and having some great tracks is half of the equation. If you're doing it yourself, you've got to give it the same care that you did to the musician side of you and just be patient and go through your phase. There was some good musicianship on here. You can't underestimate the power of just playing a straight four really nicely in time like on the guitar. It's one of those things that have you ever found Dan? It should be the easiest thing in the world and then when you go to record, you realize I'm actually quite pretty sloppy. It was all right when I was in the band years ago in a pub, you know, bumping away, but all of your timing issues get exposed when you come to perform in the studio. Am I stiffen up too? I have a song called Hindsight, I did in my channel maybe last year and there's like an overdrive of these chords and I was playing it but then I did a couple takes and by the second take I was like, oh my God, I can't even play this anymore. It's just like keeping that thing going all the time, you know. And especially us guitarists. I'm talking about six string guitarists who think to ourselves bass is so easy, right? There's only four strings. You only play normally one at a time and you start to go, well, it's just this thing where you got to go boom, boom, boom. Oh, it's pretty easy to get sloppy with that pretty quickly. Yes. Well, you know my influences so I don't actually think about bass nowadays. Speaking of my hand getting sore, I try to keep up, you know, I try to play with my fingers on a bass. I mean, I will track with a pick sometimes but I do try to use my fingers as much as I can because I just love these fingers and I don't have the hand strength of a bass player who plays all the time. I can play it, but I get tired really easily. Yeah, yeah, it does. I tend to, you know, I'm a finger picker on guitar so I'm not a classical player but I like to finger pick more than I like to strum so I tend to naturally kind of try and play the bass guitar like that rather than, rather than like that which is the way you're supposed to. I end up doing, I can't really do it here but yeah, you understand what I mean, and once in a while I've stuck with that because sometimes it works. You know what I do? I mean, here's guitar players talking about bass I mean, and I'm not always looking for a segue to talk about Rush but Geddy Lee, since we are talking about bass I mean, he's a virtuoso on the bass but he developed a style later in his career where he was sort of using his finger like a pick so he would almost do a flamenco thing or so you could double stroke like that and then I started to do that instead of doing it like this runs like this, I can't do it but with the one finger almost like a pick then I can switch between the first finger and the second finger just to keep some speed going Whatever works, I reckon That's it. But there is some reason why certain theories of playing the bass in certain ways came about because they do work but anyway, we digress and that was an interesting track we are going to get straight into some acoustic guitaring mixing, so to speak after we've heard from the sponsor of this show, DistroKid of course Yes, I use DistroKid to release my music folks just about everyone I know does actually come to think of it Could I have influenced people? I don't know, let's have a look and see whether it's worth it If you do follow the link in the description down below it's going to take you to a special page on DistroKid with this yellow banner at the top that banner is letting you know that you're going to get a further 7% discount of your first year if you sign up here and let's face it, it's already very cheap if we scroll down we can see that year's membership is $19.99 per year for an unlimited number of albums and songs and so long as it's your own music there are no extra charges and you get to keep all of the royalties from the various platforms platforms like Spotify, Apple Music Tiktok, Pandora, Amazon Instagram, Tidal, iHut Radio Deezer and more Right, now we get to the scary part of the show Dan, at least for me because I've got Cakewalk open here and I'm going to start actually looking at some acoustic guitar. I haven't actually prepared for this to be honest with you, I really haven't but I shouldn't have to prepare for it because it's a gazillion times but I do do it slightly differently each time. We'll see how we end up doing it on this occasion. Well I'm curious because acoustic is actually not one of my problems. It's not your thing you're really primarily an electric guitar. So anyway, let's start off by arranging things a little bit here Dan let's see if you can hear what's in this door at the moment Dan, I'll just play something. You can hear that we've got a sound check happening there so good stuff, let's just okay Dan, do not be shy to interrupt okay, I doubt that you would be We need a solo right here now So let's do a quick recap to the folks watching and do ask questions Dan can perhaps monitor the chat for me a little bit if something really significant comes up then it would be helpful Dan Just to do a recap folks, we've got this song it starts off with acoustic guitar you heard it briefly then this is nothing on it I absolutely hate this, I mentioned this on the first show when I did this song this was a very quick recording I did because this song is actually a demo it's intended to be a demo why? I made the demo so I could send it to Ed Thorne so he could record the drums so I wanted to give him something which was representative of how the song was envisioned to come out but I didn't spend any time you can hear some of the vocals from Susie remarkably off-key, not off-key a bit pitchy here and there which we wouldn't have kept them but this was just for a demo but the guitar I don't think sounds very good but we're going to work with what we've got why don't I think it sounds good I'll tell you why Dan I actually recorded this I'll put Dan up there just to watch his reaction I recorded this I recorded this in this studio where I am now and you may have touched upon this Dan I've got some room treatment and stuff which I think is really helpful for my mixing but it's not necessarily the best place for me to record a guitar and I don't know if you ever find this it's a bit different when you're miking up amps and things but the guitar really responds to the room and this is not actually a great room to record guitar normally when I properly record it I go down to what is my theatre room down the hallway I run a snake down there and I record in there and that's because it isn't actually perfectly treated not a perfectly treated room there's some reflections going on in there which I don't really want a completely dead room to be honest with you when I'm recording acoustic guitar and that's why I don't like the sound of this guitar because I know it can sound much better so folks try and get a good sound for any processing so better than this but anyway we're going to work with what we've got Dan that's actually a good point you made we know my history on my channel in terms of acoustic treatment and things like that but there's a bit of confusion because we're setting up this room for mixes but people are also recording in here it's not designed to be a tracking room and we don't want a dead in the room especially for acoustic guitar so if you can go somewhere where it's a bit more lively you can have a mic further away to pick up some natural ambience and see what you get because sometimes you might surprise yourself, right? So there's something odd going on in the sound of this to be honest with you, I thought I was recording stereo and I thought there were some phase issues on it you know when you get phase issues it sounds a bit weak and weird that's what I thought it was but I did actually look at it and the left and right channels are perfectly in phase with each other and I've recorded left and right channels folks, so I've recorded in stereo sometimes I record if you've only got one microphone it's fine to record just with one microphone you won't get as wide a spread you could double track so if you decide to double track the first thing I would say is one of the reasons why that stereo mic-ing sort of works well at all is because actually you're getting two they're not exactly the same tone okay if you just put them on a spectrum analyser each of the microphones would have a slightly different tone or quality which actually creates the spread if you do X, Y mic-ing you've got the capsules right next to each other if they both had exactly the same sound to them it wouldn't sound like it was in stereo at all it would sound like a mono recording it's the differences that we get which actually make it sound double track a mono guitar and you use the same microphone in the same position one of the first tips I'm going to give you when you pan them left and right is actually EQ them differently give them some different tonal qualities and you'll get a wider sound but we're not going to be doing that in today's video we're going to be taking this guitar which was recorded in stereo which you probably can't see clearly the first two channels that you can see here are the left and right recordings and hard left and right and they're going through over onto the right hand side over here to a bus and you can see my mouse wiggling around on that bus over there and that's where we're going to be doing our processing you could process the left and right channels separately if you really want to get fiddly with things you can do that and that's fine but I'm just going to do it on the stereo bus which it's going to today the last thing that I kind of want to mention about this is we're starting at the beginning of the track here have a listen it's just got an intro at the beginning and then Susie's vocal comes in when you're hurting I'm hurting too okay so that's that part of the song later on if we move up here when you need to weep I'll be your tea we've got a little bit more of the rest of the band coming in and further on still that guitar is there in all of that the same performance all the way through if we solo it we can hear that at the beginning we've got this kind of thing later on and later on again some slaps going on so it's a very very dynamic performance as we go through the reason I mention that is is because we're going to be focusing on the beginning part however because the whole mix changes and evolves this is a good point a good example of where we would be using automation in all kinds of ways quite potentially automating the EQ on this guitar there's something I'd be doing because later on Dan at the beginning it's just there with the vocal there's a little bit of clash in frequencies between a vocal and a acoustic guitar but not too much but later on especially when we get bass and piano coming in there's a lot of crossover of frequencies going on we don't really need the low end of this guitar later on when the bass is there it's not and even with some of the piano stuff so the point folks that we're going to be working on this part the beginning of the song but the requirements would change throughout the song and that's why automation which we may be talking about in a future episode is so so important would you actually automate your EQ like if you're going to have like we'll call it a scene shift or would you edit it and have it on a different track so there's two different approaches that you might you might make definitely in the past I used to do on maybe this make be done on three different tracks yeah and that makes it simple and that's straightforward but these days for some reason I prefer to automate it I don't know why maybe I was just a little scared to automate it but a lot of the plugins that I will use you know FabFilter and all that is so easy to automate I just find it keeps the project a bit tidier if I've just got the one track to deal with and I'm automating it so it's like whichever way people want to go with that but the main the main thing to be aware of is the needs of an instrument like this will change throughout the course of the track let's dive in first thing I always do is get an EQ and I'll use FabFilter that's fine doesn't have to be FabFilter folks you don't have to follow the same ones that I'm using let's go to this Pro Q3 and I will do a low cut ding like this reasonably aggressive alright why? let's play the track I'm going to just make sure it's soloed yes play the track and just have a look down this end of things folks I'm just going to put a note up here so I can get this out of the way have a look at what's going on this end so there's a whole bunch of stuff happening down here but if we put this on the solo mode and we actually listen to these frequencies can you hear anything Dan? no now I can't no nothing at all ok so I'm soloing all these frequencies down here using FabFilter and as I slide this up let's just see at which point we can start to hear something right some real low rumble there isn't there right so essentially everything below there and this obviously depends on what monitoring you're using folks if you're using a subwoofer what your headphones are capable of what your speakers are capable of everything down here is kind of useless to us right so I cut it off in fact even there where we can hear a bit I'll cut that off ok now something I should point out here because you're doing a very steep curve here FabFilter can do that really well but be forewarned that if you're using some EQs can't handle that steep of a slope but FabFilter is a it's nice I mean I sort of exaggerate a little bit there I probably would go for this kind of curve I've got here which is you know the 30 dB one and I also might even do this this is where I start is my ears now what I'm looking to do here is find a point where if I bypass this EQ I can hear no difference if that makes any sense right so if I can if I've got it up here and I start to bypass it let me just do that the easiest way I can here you can hear a difference between the two right so I know I've gone too far so I'll go to a point where I can't hear the difference now people may be asking why on earth are you doing something here which doesn't make any difference to the sound and I've seen this hotly debated in many forums because there's some people out there and I'll let you know who think this is a complete waste of time if you can't hear the difference you're sort of over-engineering it use that voice down when I mimic these people I don't know why people on tech they sound like that oh what do you do that we just assume they're idiots I guess so the thing is folks you can't hear that you can't hear all that stuff that's going on down here but some things can hear it I'm talking a lot about sort of compressors that may be further down the line for example they can hear it now if we reverse this whole thing and I wish I knew how to do that quickly I don't let's just do it this way around I'll do it this the idiot way here we go if we just did this whole thing so we've just done a reverse here so we're only listening to that yeah again we can't hear anything I've cut all the top end out I've cut all the bits we can hear normally and it's not making any difference you can see the meters on the channel it's not actually triggering anything at all if I turned up really loud you could I'm not going to do that in case I accidentally but what happens is I reckon over the period over the course of a whole project when you've got lots and lots of low end information coming from many many channels it does build up and things like bus compressors especially they're going to be hit by this and they're going to be triggered and they're going to be starting to kick in and actually be doing some compression when you actually don't want them to okay if that makes sense this is the way I've kind of given you head room I suppose in a way like this what do you reckon Dan? I was going to say I mean I've touched on this and I did a video about mid-side EQ where the focus of that video was combing out things that you don't need and especially like low end rumble and small studios I mean if you're on HS5s you're probably not going to hear it anyways right but there's something I call the cumulative effect right where yeah you may have a little rumble here a little rumble there well it's all these sort of low lying frequencies in the weeds that you don't really notice it often is where you're getting a lot of that mud in your mixes because they're combing out the stuff that you just don't need it's it's all energy right don't waste energy on things that you don't need whether you can hear it or not it doesn't need to be there just comb it out because that cumulative effect throughout the mix you'll find your mixes will start to sound cleaner often because you just all of that junk has been removed so I first started doing this a few years ago after watching Graham Cochran on the recording revolution talk about this and I thought well I'll start trying this in my mixes so for all of the forum debates that you see you don't need to do that you shouldn't do that I'm just going to say the proof is in the pudding I found that once I started doing it that my mixes improved they were a little cleaner there was more separation there was a lot less muddiness to them and I just found that I was more in control of my mixes so I'm not going to say I studiously go through with every single track in my mix and do this I don't but quite a lot of them I do especially when I start to focus on certain tracks so this is a bit of a housekeeping measure by the way you could just go ahead and do other EQ moves here with this EQ I don't this is just me being sort of separation of tasks I like to just have that there and then I close it down and it's gone and it's just done that little bit housekeeping for the low end there even though you may think I'm weird later on when I add in another pro Q3 EQ but there are some sensible reasons for doing that because obviously EQ curves start to affect each other when they're in one EQ plugin but anyway probably wouldn't hear now the next thing I do Dan this may seem a little odd is I start to think in terms of if I'd run this through an old console or some old analog equipment what would I already have got just in the bag without even thinking about it probably some sort of saturation is what you would get there's two different ways I go on this sometimes I use preamp plugins there's some from Arturia which I really like and sometimes I like to use tape machine plugins now I say this really cautiously you don't have to do it this way but I'm going to chuck in one now let's go to tape me I like this one from IK Multimedia it's from their T-Rex this do do do do this one here um first of all I like to have it in early I don't know it's just me being a little pedantic because this traditionally would be at the beginning of a signal chain I mean if you've been recording to tape and if you're playing back from tape so look you probably don't have to really have to have it in that order whatever sounds best but I get a little bit pedantic in that way put it in there so first of all the reason I'm doing this is because I know that I'm going to be on the low end of this guitar and on the high end I know I'm going to do some EQ moves and I have just found over time that if I add in and I'm thinking I want to add a little bit of sparkle on the high end of this guitar if I add it in with the controls of that you find on a plugin like this I get that sort of byproduct of saturation but I get a really natural way of adding this high end breathiness and some of the low end that I know I want to add in so I've got a mind so if I wasn't going to make those EQ moves I may not use this I could just use a straight saturation plugin of some kind maybe that would be fine but I know I'm going to make these EQ moves and for me there's something very natural about the way it happens when you do this let me just explain to you by the way I should say this plugin is very resource heavy and so you know you may find a different way of doing this if you're on a machine which is you know doesn't like CPU intensive things but anyway I like this one I'm going to play around with this control I know you can't see it clearly here but I'm going to add in some high frequencies using this control here in the plugin let me take them out and a bit of low frequency stuff there can you hear the difference I actually can a little bit just a little bit right I think something that people should understand the logic I think the same way funny enough when I do this is that I think in terms of analog signal chain is that oh it's got a tape then it'll go to the channel strip and then come later but the thing about using a saturation plugin or in this case a tape saturation they're not all made equal but the idea is harmonics to the signal lifting a little top end on an EQ in this case now they're not all created equal and they don't all do them well but a good saturation plugin a good tape plugin is going to be adding some harmonic content to track and those little subtleties make a big difference that's what I'm looking to do now at this stage I should mention we haven't got into in this series so far much in the way of what I do when I'm adding plugins at all now I suspect that this may have added a little bit of volume to things here I'm just going to bypass it I think it is and you just want to be careful of that folks you just want to be really careful to do some volume matching so that you don't fool yourself into thinking this just made things sound better and it just actually just made it sound louder rather than better better okay so what I would do I've got this this little metering plugin on my master bus at the moment okay so just to make sure of that what I'll do and this is just a good opportunity to remind folks that they should do this when they add plugins is I've got it bypassed I'm just going to take a note I'm just going to listen to it here and I'm going to take a note here so speaking about minus 18 and it's RMS is about minus 26 here at the moment okay pretty low signal actually to be honest with you but there you go and I'm just going to go to switch it on and see what the difference is yeah so it's adding about 4 dB actually it's quite a lot so I'm just going to grab that output there on the plugin and push it down by around about 4 dB there okay so let's listen to it before and after this is off and on yay so there was no we can't hear a difference in volume there which is I don't want to hear a difference in volume okay so there's two two things there first of all folks who are watching you don't want to fool yourself that you've improved the sound of something you've just made it louder and you've fooled yourself and the other thing is as you add one two three four um plugins all that gain staging work that you did earlier on is all thrown out the window as your track gets louder and louder with each plugin that you add so so I've done that now it is very subtle what's happened there let's have a listen again that's on so for me it just feels like it's smooth things out a little bit I could still afford a little bit of high frequency there but I think we can live with it for now so that's the next that's kind of what I do there Dan so far so we do the first stage which was the low cut then I like to add in something which is going to add a little bit of saturation and give me potentially an opportunity to do some sort of fairly subtle EQing sort of sound shaping okay then get rid of that then I add in another EQ plugin I told you I was going to do that didn't I yeah I sometimes have three cues on one track so this is where for me I'm going to get a little bit more surgical with things and I almost always do this with acoustic guitar we have a really weird thing going on don't we Dan with acoustic guitar I just want to talk about the sound of acoustic guitar a little bit because it's a bit of a mind for Duddle first of all whenever you hear someone playing an acoustic guitar you may be in an auditorium but if it's someone in your lounge playing acoustic guitar which sounds lovely you're two meters away from six feet eight feet away from them whatever you are away from that's how we hear an acoustic guitar normally but for us as players we don't hear acoustic guitars like that we hear them very very close up we get very much used to the sound of hearing them like that and we're holding on to them we're also feeling the vibration of it on our chest so our experience of an acoustic guitar is quite different to a listener's perspective and then when we mic the Dan things up we stick a microphone six inches away from them as if someone had put their ear like that right but you know of course if you put a microphone where you know two meters away it would sound awful because microphones do not hear things in the same ways human ears do they just don't right so we have this battle with acoustic guitar of then trying to make it sound natural again although we've recorded it from six inches away with the microphone so and again we're battling against ourselves as well for me personally because I've recorded this guitar and you know perhaps rehearse that song for a while and then heard it from a player's perspective and I don't necessarily want to give a player's perspective to the listener but anyway so there's some honky things that go on especially which I like to get rid of there's things that you may not hear from the guitar in the room when you're listening to them but for some reason the microphone grabs certain frequencies and you get a lot of o-o-o-o-o going on so that's where I start with my surgicalness is that a word surgicalness it is now it is now isn't it sergi-surgitility I'll call it anyway surgicality, surgicality let's go with surgicality alright so I love fabfilter for this got to say probably I would say to people if you're going to buy one plugin ever that was going to be useful to you time and time again it would be this plugin pro q3 it's not cheap either I've got to say it's not a cheap plugin but you'll love it you just won't want to use other EQs to be it comes as advertised yes there's so much under the hood with it but one of the useful features anyway not that you can't do this in other EQs but one of the useful features is that little headphone icon there where you can solo certain frequencies so let's play that guitar and listen to some frequencies hear that one there not a fan of that not a fan of that so what I like to do is just grab that make the cue quite a lot probably around about there just find it again oh there's more like the one subtle isn't it but it's there I'll grab another one be around about here that'll do somewhere like that I don't like those I usually find a couple in those areas that I don't like I know my guitar so you know I guess I want to say you want to be pretty careful here as well don't destroy the mid range of your guitar because that gives it presence so you don't want to get too scoopy here and take large chunks out but also don't be afraid I used to think I used to think oh I should never do more than 3dV it's too much I should never do 6 I don't know there was a rule in my head that you know she'll only be ever so subtle but I don't know sometimes I've found myself doing like 9 on some things and it just sounds right you know listen if you're doing it for a reason if you're pulling it down 2dB and you still hear it well keep going so I wouldn't get too hung up on certain values or anything like that but but I generally find if I do something big like this I start to lose more than I want to if I start to sort of you know not so I tend to be sort of a ranger doesn't know but just to give you an idea what I'm doing there is looking for sort of why I feel sort of offensive would you call them residences kind of things or just sort of offensive tones in the guitar which I don't like and also there often will be something down here sometimes in this region again just be careful with that key I don't want to go too far or too little you can just even with just careful of mic placements and you know I've done some videos on this definitely trying to keep away from the sound hole with the microphone and things like that but even when you're mic'ing up right up at the 12th fret you can still get a little boominess sometimes depending on the guitar, depending on the room between the microphone so I'm just looking to tame that a little bit that's what I'm doing down there with that one so I have a question for you why would you not do this during your first stage EQ? You could do you could do that but my thought about it is if we go back to that first one say this down here I just like to keep that separate and I don't want the second node I call these nodes nobody else calls them nodes I call them nodes that will start to affect that one so that's one you could do it as I said earlier you could do it but yeah it's just for me it's more of a separation of tasks so I've started off by getting rid of all that rubbish down there which I can't hear but I know it's going to affect it then I've sort of sweetened the tone here with this plugin I've just given that little bit of high end I like especially and a little bit of low end I like the nature of it from this plugin and then this one is where I'm sort of tidying all that up a bit and as I can say I can get a bit more surgical so yeah I guess you could do it you could do this at the beginning I'm not sure though whether you would undo some of your work when you add the tape plugin say you had this before the tape plugin it's going to come down to swapping them around and see if you can hear a difference here as well so let's do that I can't hear any difference whether I put the you know the tape or this one first so yeah usually is for that I reckon at the end the same somewhat goes with you know what we're going to talk about in a moment which is compression because there's always that debate whether you EQ first and compress after or vice versa and there's some good talks in forums about the pros and cons of each approach and at the end of the day spend much less time in forums and spend a lot more time just trying it for yourself is my advice or less times on forums and more time watching good youtube channels exactly so anyway that's now sometimes what I do here if I still haven't got what I want out of the high end sometimes I will do a high shelf here as well let's have a listen I'm not sure if that's going to work or not I'm going to leave it there but sometimes when you add the compressor afterwards and then you start to add what I'm going to add later delay and reverb and things like that sometimes I can find that high shelf maybe too much especially on that E string can you hear that E string there Dan can get a little bit much sometimes you know so what I could do let's just show you and this is a really good example of using dynamic EQ there's some frequencies probably around about here I'm going to say where would it be around about 4K I'm guessing where that E string got that ding happen where I could actually then just surgically control that little bit so I can leave my shelf in there but I may bring that down a little bit there ding ding so listen it's that stuff there which can get a bit not so nice you can get on your nerves a little bit I find so I could use a dynamic EQ there because you know that it's really just when that E string is being played so I do that in actually that's a good example of I mean we're in the intro here where the guitar is kind of on its own but eventually it's going to be a part of the ensemble right the disadvantages of mixing in solo which for example that little plucking on the E string may actually be some nice articulation in the context of the mix as opposed to as a solo instrument where it's a bit much that's why if it's part of a full mix is that when you start to get into those kind of decisions it's best to do it in context of the mix to really know for sure absolutely absolutely and again this would be something that could be automated I mean it's really easy to automate these things you can just switch it off when it comes to that thing it's easily done so let's have a look at this dynamic EQ on this I always get confused on this you know you can see I'm getting confused you can see it's happening a little bit there I probably would fill around with that a little bit more though to find the frequencies that are offending there but it's just one of the sort of things that maybe I would control because I don't necessarily want to lose those frequencies with the rest of the guitar performance there's a nice airiness in there but just at particular points like I say when the E string kicks in there then they may become a little bit irritating to me so yeah that would be the next thing I do and after that well here's an interesting topic Dan I would go for compression next that's if I use compression at all because you don't have to use compression folks here's a here's a headline for you you don't have to use compression you should use compression if you think that there's the dynamics in this instrument are out of control or if you want to cut the peaks so that you can push the RMS so to speak up if you just want to make the whole thing sound louder without actually peaking too high then you could use compression for that or if you like the quality of a particular compressor you know particularly talking about emulations of analog compressors and they may bring something to the party even if you're not really using the compression that's sort of valid but don't feel like you kind of have to compress a guitar like this right now if this is in the middle of a much bigger song, a louder song or more of a rock song or something like that it's much more likely that you would want to compress it I often don't compress these type of acoustic guitar performances I like them to breathe I like them to be very very dynamic but if I were to compress it then I almost certainly will go for something like an LA2A style compressor why? because it's actually going to be very transparent and you're not going to really be aware of it compressing at all let's just try and find one here ooh let's go universal audio I've got my Apollo plugged in why not? I'll get all the lead test on you here you don't have to use universal audio compressor what am I looking for here let's go this LA2A okay this is a good chance to talk about LA2A I'm going to be making a video soon about LA2A compressors some of you are using them wrong this is my guess let me just try and rearrange this screen again okay so there's really there's a few knobs and buttons on this but there's going to be a limiter and a compressor but there's essentially two knobs on an LA2A one on the left hand side is marked gain the one on the right hand side is peak reduction you're not mucking around with ratios attack or release or anything like that there is a fixed ratio it's not really quite fixed because that actually changes depending on what it's receiving but you're not controlling the ratio and there's a difference between the ratio obviously the limiter has a much more aggressive ratio than the compressor but you've got two knobs gain and peak I'm not going to ask Dan here about these controls because I don't want to embarrass him in case he gets the question wrong but I know another YouTuber friend of ours was doing this wrong okay you want to give me a hint no, no, no no, no it's an easy mistake to make because normally we would have an output gain on the right hand side of an interface but the gain on an LA2A is an output gain this is the control which is on the left hand side this is an output gain it's just like a volume knob folks at the end of the process and it's turning up and down it's not an input gain even though it's on the left hand side that confused me, I can tell you for a while all of your control what you're really using is this one peak reduction it's the only control you're really ever going to be using to actually compress anything here so I don't want to go into the technicalities of what it's actually doing but essentially this one knob is the only knob you need to use on an LA2A compressor and if you want to volume matching as we did earlier on, which you should be then you'll use the gain finally to do that but in terms of just getting your compression going on the left hand knob further you turn it up, the more compression you get you need to turn the volume up a bit here so we can hear it I'm literally only getting like about this is not a strong signal so I'm getting about one dB of compression there okay and now I'm just going to quickly volume match that down before we talk about why I would have done that I'll just go in and out I'm earballing this rather than using the meter this time last time I used it but I'm definitely earballing it so that's all I would do and you probably can't hear much different folks if you're listening at home, I can't hear much difference but again this is small incremental stuff the reason why people like to use things like an LA2A on a guitar and quite often on vocals is because it's pretty transparent you're kind of not really aware that there's a compressor there it's not very aggressive at all but it is just doing a little bit of peak reduction in there which is just controlling the peaks of the guitar a little bit that's if you wanted to do it that's probably what I would normally eight times out of ten be doing in terms of compressing do you want to jump in and say anything there Dan? No, I'm feeling the same way compressors like this do confuse people because they're looking for obvious changes and it goes back to what you said at the beginning when you were rolling off bottom frequencies they're just very very subtle moves that the sum of the parts as you start to introduce other things these little moves have a cumulative effect overall exactly I'm glad you've said that should we have a listen to the cumulative effect? should we do that? I'm going to switch all of that signal chain off everything we've done there with those four plugins so have a listen to the original sounds louder I reckon might have lost a bit too much out of the LA2A this is the original now just sounds a bit smooth to me a bit more refined it sounded really boxy at the beginning is the main thing I'm hearing there but I do not like that I'm going to say right away I don't like that high shelf I put in there so I'm just going to go in and I'm going to disable that for a moment not enjoying that it's a bit too much for me have a listen again sorry this is let me be clear here this is with everything off with everything on yeah I think Keanu's got it right it just sounds a little bit warmer just sounds a little bit more sort of refined to me that's the first thing I'm doing that's a lot of work isn't it just to get a little bit of improvement I've got to say that I would have hoped for a little bit better result than that I will probably work on that quite a lot more under normal circumstances but being as we're on a live stream we just have to make do with what we've got this is the nature of being on a live stream but these things do add up and then we've got that one track and that adds up when you start to do all of this to lots of individual instruments and gradually you find that things become more refined well everything I'm going to do of course we've got the much more exciting aspects of adding delay and reverb to this in a moment but first of all I'm going to take a little bit of a breather I'm going to quickly go and take a hear a word from the sponsor DistroKid if you want to release your music via DistroKid there's just a couple of things you need first of all the music itself here's mine in my door cakewalk and I'm holding it to an uncompressed wave file for best results now the other thing you'll need is some artwork I just grabbed an old photo which I'd taken on the beach chucked on some text here and that's what I call art then I went over to DistroKid and I just have to fill in this extra easy form it's a no-brainer form you get helped all the way through with little hints and things you can't really do anything wrong you just go ahead and confirm a few things about your music and then you just have to actually upload the artwork and the song itself and DistroKid takes care of the rest it's going to send it out to all of the best platforms so that people can hear and buy your music just want to do a shout out to everyone in the chat who's sticking with us it's only a little bit of a long show okay Dan do you need a break or anything like that you're going okay over there I'm good I'm good I'm good I'll drink a walk do that we're going to go to the parts where we can really hear a bit more of a difference now but yeah I just want to say hi to the people lots of people here in the chat today we've got 46 people watching at the moment or 42 gone down they left during the break they've all gone to sign up for DistroKid there you go but I notice whilst we do have 40 odd people watching we've only got 30 something likes so do make sure you like the stream at the moment folks if you're watching that helps to let more people know they should be coming over and watching so this guitar does sound a little it could just do that little bit of polish on the top of it and I think that happens for me when we start to add a bit of space in there kind of is sounding a bit like it's got a microphone six inches away from it at the moment so let's place it in a room a little bit more and for years and years I just used to chuck a reverb plugin on here and that was it made it sound lovely right away just like when you go to karaoke and people always have lots and lots of echo on their microphone because it makes you sound nice well we're not going to do that we're not going to do that quite a way we're going to get a little bit more refined on that so if you've been doing that up until now don't feel bad we all probably did that but I'm going to show you a slightly better way of doing it first of all um pan controls that help us to go left and right in the mix so I like to think about it and reverb can have the effect of going forward or backwards in the mix so if you put lots and lots of reverb on something it can make it start to disappear in the background if the balance between reverb and the dry sound is is is off it's just one way of thinking about it so rather than going straight for reverb um one of the things that you can do to keep something present even though it's going to have the sound of a room in there is to use delay okay do you stand you go delay and reverb or yeah I tend to put delays a reverb is generally my last thing or I'm busing to them anyways so it'll be the last bit yeah and that's a good point because we're going to do both of these we're going to do delay and reverb but we're going to do them on separate busses okay the reason for that is when we've added this delay effect that we're going to have I don't want that if we had this as an insert it would go from the delay to the reverb yeah and the delayed sound would also be fed into the reverb I don't want that because I just don't want that that effect I want the dry sound to go to the delay and the dry sound to go to the reverb a separate entities that's why they're going to be on two separate buses okay so I'm going to go send here to a new stereo bus which in cakewalk here has gone right on to the end let me just make sure I'll call it g delay g delay so I'll add in one of my favorite delays I'm going to go Arturia it's called eternity let's have this come up over here it's going to be a bit weird let me just see what I've got to begin with on this let me just see what I've got to begin with on this see all that lots of delay on there I don't want that at all well I'm trying to get here folks what I'm aiming for here is what is often called a slap back delay okay where we hear only one repeat pretty quickly okay so at the moment we've got lots and lots of repeats there and it's actually going through some filters and things which I'm going to switch off here I'm going to turn off I'm going to work in milliseconds here I'm not going to sync this to the to the tempo so I'll switch that off so starting off with this and there's like five or six delays there let's turn them up really long to begin with and use this feedback control it's usually called feedback the number of delays you get there's about three there so I'll go down to the bottom hear that there's just one repeat there happening okay that's what I want so whatever delay plugin you're using first aim is to get one repeat okay now I want to get the timing of that delay down really really low I've got the left and right channel synced at the moment I'll just use that for the moment bring it down pretty low let's see what it's like around about 12 milliseconds hmm a bit much isn't it let me just change the mix I forgot to mention this whenever you've got a plugin like this on a bus and if the plugin has a dry wet mix knob put it all the way up to wet put wet full on okay because you've obviously got your dry signal in your original track and you can control the volume of the wet signal from your bus yeah and the reason my guitar got a lot louder than is because I had that mix almost down to dry let's try again and we're getting this you can hear it but it's a very weird not such a nice effect at the moment so I'm going to fix that first of all before I go any further I'm going to change this to a pre send okay so it's going from my original channel to the bus as a pre it's not going to be affected by the fader now I'm just going to turn the fader all the way down it's about the fader set to about minus 4 dB at the moment I'll just remember I'll turn that all the way down now all we can hear is the delay on the bus all right that's why we can't hear it at all because that's all we're hearing is the delay right it's just the one delay so now we will start to hear it when I unlink these two channels the left and the right channel I'll unlink them and I'll just start to make them different I've got the left channel at 9 milliseconds I've got the right channel at 16 have a listen it sounds really nice and spread out now doesn't it daddy's got a new stereo that's right it might be a bit much right so it's nice but it's a bit much okay but it's there now what I'm going to do is just turn that down a bit on the fader for the bus in fact let's turn it all the way down I'll reintroduce my original guitar so now we're just hearing the original guitar no delay now I'm going to start to blend in that delay about there can you hear it? I'll mute it without the delay with the delay I like that it makes your ears go like that it sounds good and then you go oh it sounds nice yeah now that may be a little bit too obvious still I'm not necessarily looking for something again that I can super hear at this point but I don't know I could live with that I reckon I could live with it but if I didn't want to make it quite so obvious I may change the delay times I could still go a little bit lower there potentially the important thing is to keep the left and the right channels different from each other in terms of the delay time here very very important if you want that kind of nice spread the other way I may blend it in is just use that fader on the bus okay you know just depends some people might say well why not use the send level you could use the send level on the channel but be aware that it's not important on this particular plugin but send is going to change the amount of signal which is sent to a plugin let's say we were using this as a compression bus it may change the behaviour of the compressor if we send different levels right whereas the fader on the bus is just changing the volume of the final output of the effect if that makes any sense at all just something to think about that's why I would use those in this case probably would matter whether you use the send or the fader to get the result you want okay so I've got that happening not too not too unhappy with that there is some chance I may use a bit of a filter on this because you've got to be very careful with both delay and reverb that you can start to get some buildups happening in the low to mid end there are some filters built into this plugin I don't like the result of them I have to say very much there's some noise which gets introduced that I don't really like it's not very transparent so what I might do in this case is a good example of it it's just before this delay on the bus over here I'll add in let's go a fab filter pro cue I'm sorry the good thing they don't charge per instance I should put an affiliate link for this let's go to a situation again you know I had that as a pre saying so I can turn that original guitar down again I'm just going to get rid of it all the way down so we're only hearing the bus at the moment but it's pretty quiet by the way let's turn it up again for a moment so we can hear it so here is where I may again put in a big something like this probably I'm just going to have it I'm just going to have that right and that sounds horrible at the moment but when you bring the original guitar back in it's adjusting some balances here okay it's just a little less muddy let's have a listen here's without the filter with the filter it's slight but it's there I can just hear that so again this is another one of those things although at the moment you may be thinking when you're listening folks by the way moderators could we just do something about the rubbish in that chat there I may even do it myself let's just block that user lovely stuff maybe that's what you're into like magnets those every single video I release bang bang bang so many comments they never get through thankfully thanks Mima where was I at before I was rudely interrupted by that old dating site yes so the cumulative effect of making sure you take care of all these little things folks so making sure that you're cleaning out filtering out the rubbish that you don't want in on the delays the reverbs that low end thing on one track like this you're going to hear a subtle difference but I can promise you when you take this care and attention over a number of tracks in your whole project it makes the world of difference to how clean the track sounds in my opinion well not just in my opinion I really do think it makes a big difference it's a matter of fact I will concur it makes a big big big difference and finally we're almost going to do the same kind of thing with some reverb on this so I'll do another send here add a new stereo bass let's call it G Rev because I can't be bothered to type the whole word of reverb that's how lazy I can get sometimes and I'll add in I'm going to go Arturia again it sounds like it looks like an Arturia advert doesn't it but I've mentioned this so many times my absolute favourite reverb let's just take a moment to look at the glory of it we are going to again we're going to do the same thing I like to have this as a pre so I can have a listen to it in a moment all by itself let's turn that delay off for a second alright I'm just going to get rid of it for a moment we'll bypass it for a moment so let's have a listen to this reverb got to remember that mix control again there as well so I'm just putting that all the way up to wet because it's on a bus folks so whenever you've got an effect like this on a bus turn it all the way up so you're only hearing the wet signal on the bus have a listen again right there's a big big old reverb there I don't know what hall we're in the Albert Hall or whatever it is I don't want to be there with this guitar that's way too big but one of the things I'm hearing there it's just a default thing is there's some modulation on this reverb which sounds absolutely disgusting I'm going to get rid of that so I'm going to the modulation controls on this particular plug-in so we'll get rid of that first of all alright now we're in a big room let's make it smaller I just like that effect don't you you could play with that all day you've got to use that let me get sized still pretty big but when we blend it in as I'm going to in a moment it won't quite sound quite so big the other thing I'm going to do again is just do it's already got a high-pass filter switched on here so rather than use a separate EQ as I did with the delay I actually like the high-pass filter in this plug-in so I'm just going to adjust that sorry I need to make sure I don't want to hear the original guitar let's just have a listen to the reverb so this is the reverb without the filter on right hear all that low end it's horrible if you have that on there it's just going to make everything sound boomy and yuck so I'm pushing that up experience tells me that that's going to be about right now I'm going to go and I'm going to blend the guitar so again I'm just going to push the fade all the way down for the reverb put the guitar back to where it was which is about minus 4 or so and then I'm just going to blend that reverb in now we're going to talk about that in a moment why I've stopped at that level but we'll turn that delay back on all of this everything I've done here is actually about starting points because and the reverb is such a good example of why I'm talking about this this reverb may just sound lovely I can listen to that oh it sounds nice doesn't it just sounds nice right that doesn't mean it's going to sound good when all of the other instruments come in okay so we've been doing a lot of stuff here all in isolation and it's not too bad for this because at the beginning of this track it is just guitar and vocal okay but even when I add the vocal in and that hasn't got any reverb on it at the moment the vocal but even when I add that in and that's got reverb and the guitar's got reverb then we start to get into play just between those two things this level of reverb that I've set here at the moment is a starting point as I say but finally when I come to adding other things in I may be adjusting that it's not my finishing point it's just where I'm thinking ah that's a sounds okay like that so Dan you know it's so important isn't it and I know I've heard you talk about this before and often we hear lots of people don't do these things in solo this is a bit of a different example it's not in solo as such it just happens to be the only instrument in the song at this point but that reverb could be more too much later in the song or it might not be enough you may not be able to even hear it when the other instruments come in and you may be thinking I want to hear a bit of that reverb but do you have this do you have that kind of thing where especially at the beginning of a mix you do have to have a starting point even though you're not going to listen to things in solo you just want to get some sort of starting point for your tracks my process is kind of similar to what you're doing here because especially as a guitar player and I've actually talked about this a lot on my channel is that I need to appease the guitar but I need to be aware of the whole production and you kind of have to separate that so you know recording acoustic or recording electric guitar she have a process where the first couple of plugins I call it I'm shaping the tone to my ear so it sounds good to me and that's sort of that starting point that you're talking about then I go into contacts like my last EQ because I may have three EQs or I do like a pre EQ you know notching out at the beginning and then I might use a channel strip or a channel strip bring some of that saturation that you as you did with the tape plugin sometimes I generally do it with a channel strip and I'm still working in solo at that point where I'm getting that starting point I want the guitar just to here you go it sounds good now let's and then once I reach that point where I'm happy then I go in contacts draw on another EQ at that point and then I'll adjust my reverbs and things like that so they sound right in the mix so that is that sort of prep it make it sound good to your ear then get in and then fit it in exactly exactly because there's a final process which I can't really show here which is EQ in terms of I think the most useful word is to carve out a space for this instrument so I mentioned earlier on that later on in this particular track we've got bass we've got piano and more vocals which all of those are going to share some frequencies with this guitar now I need to make a decision about which ones I want to have more presence I want to stand out more which are going to be more in the background but EQ is going to be another so I could have another EQ on this bus you know as well so worth remembering by the way I just want to say quickly in terms of routing as well once we get a kind of a sound here I'm talking about a style this guitars you know got a certain sound to this reverb another thing you might want to remember folks is you might want to take this guitar bus which I've got here and the guitar delay and the guitar reverb and send them all to one bus so you've got one fader because if you start mixing this guitar the way I've done it here with the pre sends unfortunately I could mix this guitar and the balance I could so turn the guitar down we've turned it all the way down we can still hear its reverb and its delay so the balance between the guitar and its effects will go out of balance when I start to mix the guitar just using this fader sorry I haven't got my I haven't got up on the screen it's not very helpful working blind here folks so yeah so I know it gets complex with routing but it's really quite necessary in my opinion so now route all of these elements through to one bus which would be guitar ok especially if you use a pre fader send as I have done that not so much if you use a post fader because if you use a post fader send then when you adjust the volume of that guitar fader then you know the effects are going to change in volume as well because there's less signal being sent to them and it sort of brings me to a question that I almost put up on the screen there just a moment ago trying to find it do you want to answer this one Dan what would be the difference if you kept the reverb at unity talking about the reverb fader and lowered the send gain instead of working with the reverbs fader I mean different plugins react differently but often plugins sort of react to the signal right so if you are lowering or raising the sends I think the effect on the reverb would be different right at least for me and it's different with different some plugins are more reactive right now I tend I kind of it's a hard question it really it depends right it's kind of a feel thing in your ears I mean when I I don't work in cakewalk I work in logic on the send I hit option it puts it right in the middle and like okay everything's gang buster everything's great but then as I start to tweak especially here's the thing you may be sending multiple instruments to the same bus so you can send different amounts of signal depending let's say you're double duple tracking your guitars you may you'll send them all to the same bus but then you can adjust the send levels of all the different ones right so this way you have individual instruments why and at that point that the send itself for the bus sorry becomes sort of your master right and then each individual instrument that's sent to that bus their levels are all customized based on what each one of the needs right question or did I just you did answer it let me get a big guitarist on you because I'm just going to try and explain this in a slightly different way this may confuse people and it may not it may help you to understand but imagine the different amplification stages on an amp I've got a vox tube amp here a valve amp however you want to call it and the first knob on there is gain right now what I could do is turn that gain up really loud to overdrive my tubes right but I could have the ultimate volume on the amp turn down really low so I'll get a distorted you know over driven guitar sound but not very loud in my room with the volume down low right yeah so in other words I'm sending a whole bunch of signal to those tubes and they're getting all warmed up and they're over driving the signal but ultimately doesn't have to be loud right on the other hand I could have the gain turn down really low and have a really clean sound I'm not over driving the tubes much but I could turn the volume and have a loud clean sound does that make sense so far down well the same thing would happen for example if you had a guitar amp sim on one of these busses if you send it a very loud signal from your send it would have the effect of over driving that amp sim and you'd have the same effect right yet you could still have it very quiet in the mix by using the fader on the bus yeah however if you never send a very loud signal so you have the send down low to the amp sim it will never overdrive if it's good amp sim that is it will never overdrive and you'll never get the effect of an over driven guitar so for that type of effect especially if that's on a bus then the send could make quite a bit difference because you're changing the input gain the input level which is being sent to the effect right but with a plug in like a reverb less so depending on the plug in okay if it was emulating an old analog reverb unit or an old delay unit which sometimes you know they obviously was talking earlier they might add saturation or some distortion or something like that then the amount of signal you send to it could make a difference to what's happening with that plug in does that make sense Dan? yes and much like I said a lot of plugins are designed to react based on the signal that it's fed it's kind of the analog logic where in digital it probably is not necessary but you know there's a lot of sort of old school mentality that still survives the deeper we get into digital music is that plugins are reactive to the signal and that's where they try and create some of the randomness as opposed to a very linear sounding effect where it's very reactive to the signal and that's where it keeps it interesting and you know you can find that sweet spot and different instruments will respond differently so yeah now finally just to confuse things more don't forget that we could be sending more than one thing to a bus so a number of different guitars or a number of different vocals or what have you could be sharing the same reverb and that's where send becomes a bit more useful as a control for how much reverb you want on any one particular instrument right and then your fader on the bus is just going to be controlling the overall output of the sum of all of those things which have been sent to the reverb whew you know you know it's something and we've talked about this as we've discussed other DAWs is that in most DAWs we have unlimited tracks unlimited buses like you said you can bus your bus your groups you can you know whatever in old studios you couldn't really do that because you had a fixed number of subs in the master and I think depending on where you are in your learning curve of mixing you want to be careful not to overload yourself and get too deep into too many tracks into too many layers of mixing down to buses and buses on buses on buses because you're going to introduce all sorts of problems so I mean I would always lean I'm leaning a bit more simpler these days I'm trying to think like okay I don't have any limitations but I'm I'm manufacturing limitations because some of the best mixes in the world were were mixed on you know let's say at most 48 tracks some even less with a limited number of buses and occasionally they had to mix down to fit things in and some of the greatest sounding records in history right as opposed to today where we have oh I got a thousand tracks in my mix but you know where we get so sometimes I do I do try to practice the less is more the more I learn to mix the less I try to do because it just sounds better you know I think it just sounds better great with you and you know there's a number of different ways to do things as well when we talk about these buses some people I think it's probably a mistake when when I hear people say I don't use buses at all then I think you're probably not getting especially when it comes to reverbs and things like that I think it's a bit of a mistake most of the time to have them as inserts but yeah you don't need to overdo I mean I like I use them as organizational things sometimes they're not really making any difference to the sound whatsoever it's just a way of kind of grouping things together but yeah well what a great show I've really enjoyed this it was an hour and a half long thank you so much for your time Dan it's been really really much more fun for me I have to say to have someone here to kind of bounce off and talk about the things it was very educational Mike I have to say you know it's just I mean you and I we talk all the time but to actually watch you work at least you know a little slice to see your process I picked up a couple of things that I'm going to try especially busing delays I bus my reverbs but I don't often bus my delays but I like the logic there that's just one extra to keep things sort of cleaned up and again it's not that so much right or wrong but it's about just understanding the choices that if you put that delay in as an insert and then you bust your reverb just remember that that delayed signal is also being sent to the reverb and you may want that and you may not want it but it's just being aware of the choices and and how what's going on and the effects of what's going on often cases it could be so subtle you may not notice the difference but yeah I like to do that. Cool stuff I hope you'll come back again Dan for another one really I maybe I should have you on the show and you can talk to me about how you process electric guitar because I'm not an expert on that I would love to do that that would be a lot of fun I mean it's right in my wheelhouse I had to pull one cliché there it is that would be incredibly useful let's let's see that up and do it sometimes I'm sure I'm sure you know you're much more knowledgeable on everything electric guitar than me so I would love for you to do that folks make sure you hit Dan up on social media he's got a great new Facebook group which he's had going for a few weeks over there I haven't got a link for that but I have got a link to his YouTube channel in the description hopefully he's got some links to his Facebook from his YouTube channel but yeah been a pleasure to have you my friend and I look forward to seeing you again thank you so much to everyone who's been here throughout the show it's been a great show in terms of activity there in the live chat some great contributions in there some nice questions coming up as well I'm really appreciating that we will see you next week around about the same time on Fix My Mix you take good care of yourselves