 Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. Welcome to FixMyMix, number, where are we? 25? Oh my goodness me, 25 weeks of absolute fun. We're going to continue this week on this week's show with some live mixing. I don't know why I do this to myself. It's absolutely terrifying I can tell you because normally mixing is kind of a solitary thing for me. And it's a bit fiddly and boring to watch probably but I'll try and save the exciting bits for the show, I guess. Before we do continue, I must say I've just been watching Pete Johns over at Studio Live today. He's been on the channel many times folks. I hope you know who he is. He's probably in the chat right now. He just did a really interesting show over there about copyright and I learnt loads from it. I deal with copyright issues on YouTube in a very small way and that is mostly to do with this show because mostly I get copyright claims pretty much every week on this show because I'm playing other people's music of course. And that reminds me that the reason I'm able to dedicate so much time and effort to this show is because this show is actually sponsored by DistroKid. That's who I release all of my music with. It's who Pete Johns released all of his music with and it's who most people I know are releasing their music through. If you release your music through DistroKid it makes it very, very easy to get it out there to all of the places you really want to get it to like Spotify, iTunes, Google Play, Amazon Music, all that stuff. So do follow that link if you are interested in releasing your music. It's quite easy to do. We'll find out about that a little bit later. I want to say hi to people who are here live in the chat. It wouldn't be a live show if it wasn't. Well, it would be a live show still but it would just be me talking to myself and that is actually something I do quite a lot to be honest with you. But anyway, it wouldn't be much fun. I want to say hi to a few people though. Let's say hi to who we got here. We've got Paul Morgan. Nice to have a Glaswegian in here. We've also got Rock from Argentina. Always good to see you here Rock every single week. We've got some new names in here as well. Nice to see. Oh, not so nice. Clayton von Kluge. Greetings from the Blue Ridgemen. There's a copyright strike if I sing that probably. We have Keonra. Thank you for being here Keonra and for doing some admin moderation in the live chat. I hope we don't have any issues this week. We did last week a little bit, didn't we, for the first time? We don't have too many issues. Everyone is so well behaved normally. We have Doug who is doing the same in here. Nice to see you as usual Doug. Thanks for your dedication. And I can't say a big enough thanks also to Mimo Japan who is just here, there and everywhere. Usually sorting out things that I haven't sorted out. So thank you Mimo for being here. We've got the produce aisle in here. By the way, produce aisle. Nice short video I saw yesterday, which was very, very good. And I have got your song, which I was almost going to play this week, but another one got in there. But I will play your song probably next week. I think quite an interesting story and quite an interesting song actually. So looking forward to playing that. By the way, if you don't know who the produce aisle is, you can follow her channel and she does some great cakewalk videos as well. And then finally, let's just do a quick hello to, where are we? Did I say, here we go. Oops, which one did I click on? It's a bit random. Doug again. Try again. Mike, it's live. Mark, Mark Brault. Nice to see you here as well. So look, folks, because with these shows where I'm doing some hands-on mixing, we'll talk about that in a moment, I haven't got any guests on. So it's very, very important that you do take part in the chat when we're playing. We're going to still be playing some songs today. And let me know what you think about the mix. But this is the second special edition of the show, where we're going to do some hands-on actual mixing of a song. And you can get a little bit of insight about how I go about things in that way. But first of all, before we get into that, let's have a listen to the first song. That's been sent in that we're going to have a listen to today. Now, a bit of an in one, this bit of an in one. Because this song is actually, actually has been sent in by one of our moderators and also includes performances from another moderator. I shall put their names up on the screen now. I've made a little name for you guys. Doug and Mimo. Sounds like a really cheesy duo that would play a local pub, doesn't it? But there you go. It's Doug and Mimo. Doug sent in a song that he's been working on with Mimo Japan in actual fact and wanted to get our thoughts on it. I don't have any real background to the song itself. But what I can tell you is Doug played a guitar, bass, drums and vocals and did the mixing. Whilst Mimo played electric piano, organ, sax, I think it's probably a virtual sax and additional vocals. You did additional vocals Mimo, really? Anyway. And he also mastered it apparently. So this is a master track. So I've only listened to like a few seconds of this to be honest with you. So this is my first time to hear it. So let's all have a listen together and give Doug and Mimo some honest feedback please about this song which I should pull up now. And I guess it's called Could Be. Is that right Doug? Let's know. Okay, what a nice start to the show thanks to Doug and Mimo for putting that together and sending it in. Overall, this is one of those ones where, well, I don't really know if you guys had some mixing success before this show. But I like to think that maybe you've taken something from these shows and put it all together and it's come together like this because it's it's pretty good mix overall. This is very, very good. This is pretty much releasable in many, many ways. But when you release something, I think that two or three months later or six months later when you listen to it like I do, then everything's going to become very apparent to you. And it's going to be the little things that are going to bother you. So I'm going to point out the little things that are going to bother you in six months time if you were to release this today on Distra Kid. It's really just a levels thing. I thought the overall tone of it, by the way, nice song, great vocals there from Doug. I love the slightly unusual vocal treatment there. Yeah, that was that was a nice touch. It just felt right for this song. And lots of performance stuff in there was very good. The guitar playing was very, very good. The sax was a nice highlight in the song. So lots and lots of good stuff going on there. So I only have a few little comments to make first of all with that vocal. I suspect that you've already done some vocal automation in there, maybe. But if not, then I think towards the end that lead vocal and the harmony vocals that were coming in sort of, I guess about 80% in to the song, Doug and Mimo. So those harmony vocals started to mask that lead vocal a little bit for me. So I think you need to look at bring that. I would bring those harmonies down just a tad but also think that that lead needs to come up a bit towards the end. Nice vocal needs to stay on top there. There was a lovely bass tone to this song. So the actual bass guitar itself, I thought had a really nice tone to it. And there was some nice playing in there. It was a bit of a highlight for me as I was listening, and maybe because it was a highlight. I'm not sure about this, but I think you should experiment with just nudging up that bass guitar. Just a tiny tail. I'm talking a very small amount here. I would just edge it up throughout the whole song. But yeah, I really enjoyed that. Now the sax was wonderful. I thought a couple of things about the sax. First of all, it could do with a little more presence at times, especially in the solo itself. So it was sounding a little bit scooped to me. So I think maybe the saxophone could do with, yeah, maybe the level coming up in the solo and also a little bit more presence. So you get a gain that, you know, in the sort of high mids probably there just to give it a little bit of bite coming through. And finally, the only note, the other note that I made here was I thought the hi-hat was a little sizzly. What do I mean by that? It was just a little bit harsh. It was one of those things again, and I've said this on the show before. I couldn't quite make my mind up if it was because of the streaming or because of the actual hi-hat itself. I'd have to go back and listen to the original Wayfold that Doug sent me. But yeah, that was something that you may want to take a look at. And that's all I really have to say about that great song. I really enjoyed it as I say it very much. Thank you for sending it in. Now, we often have songs sent in here, which I think are on that verge, you know, where they're almost there and could almost be released. But sometimes they just need a little bit of love and, you know, care and attention. There was a different phase I was looking for. Turn to love and care. Whatever. Tell me. It's hard to tell you when it's eight o'clock in the morning and you were up late last night. Anyway, we're going to talk about songs like that after this little word from our 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 exporting it to an uncompressed WAV 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. Now, a couple of weeks ago, or maybe a couple of weeks ago, somebody was saying in the Facebook group, that is the Creative Source Cakewalk Facebook group. There should be a link for that in the description if you're not already a member, go over there. Somebody was mentioning that it would be good on the channel if I were to take some of these mixes that we get to fix my mix and sort of break them down and take a look at them. And I rather stupidly on my part decided that was a good idea. I say stupidly, it's a good idea. But I rarely... You know my thing is that I'm so focused when I'm normally mixing. Me and talking and being focused don't really work together. So it was difficult last week for me. I will say to you, I was out of my comfort zone by doing a bit of sort of mixing live as it were. But I did it anyway and I do think it's valuable and it's worth taking a look at. So sort of going by... I was looking for a phrase which was the skin of my pants but I'm not sure that it's even a phrase. But it is now I guess. Going by the skin of my pants and doing this on the fly, I decided I'm going to continue this week with this because it is quite valuable. Now, a couple of excuses in advance. Last week, I was going to use a song which somebody had sent into the show. That was the idea, yeah. But we hadn't quite sort of got it prepared, me and the artist. And it wasn't quite ready. So in the meantime, I sort of used one of my own songs to temporarily, you know, sort of step in to show you what I do in terms of preparing a song for a mix and how I go about that. So we did that with one of my songs last week. I knew that process. But using the song that I was originally going to use. Okay, so it's not the same song as last week. It doesn't really matter. I'm just looking at some of the comments here. The seat of your teeth. Yeah, I'm going by the seat of my teeth, zombie. So anyway, the song itself was on the show two weeks ago now. And it's a song by a regular on the show Music Life Crypto. And the song was called No One Really Lessons. Okay, let's just pop that up on the screen now. So, you know, so we are going to be continuing mixing a song, but this song. Now, let's have a quick listen to that song now as a bit of a reminder to ourselves what we will listen to and why I chose this song. Okay, so that's the song that we are going to be working with. Thank you to Music Life Crypto for allowing us to do that, because we are going to start to dig into this song a little bit, which means we're going to expose some things in there, which I think could have been improved during the tracking is one thing. And we're going to be hearing some vocals completely isolated, which is so difficult for any vocalist to have released or shown publicly, I have to say. So, you know, thank you so much for Music Life Crypto again for helping us to do this. Let's have a look at the actual project itself. I'm going to pull that up. And because I'm new to this folks, give me a moment. I'm going to arrange this in a better way so that you can see. Okay, I realized last week I had my main screen at a bad resolution. So I hope you're able to see a little bit more this week anyway, but we'll see how we go. So this is the project itself after I've done some of the tidy ups that I talked about last week. Okay, so let's just recap what some of those are. When the project came to me, of course, from Music Life Crypto, he'd done quite a number of things that I would normally do myself. And that is some basics like labeling the tracks. Now, I went ahead and I did change some of the labels of these tracks to things that are a little bit more meaningful to me. Okay, and I think that's important to make labels that are going to actually help you to identify things quickly. Because I think that we want to work reasonably quickly on our static mix, as I said last week. I also recolored some of these just to my own preferences. And there's a bit of a logic to that, how those colors are sort of grouped together in different ways. I added some markers in. There was no markers in the project file. And I find it really, really helpful. You can see at the top there, I've got some markers that, again, they may not be necessarily correct in terms of what, whether it's a chorus or whether it's a verse. I couldn't quite figure that out. Sometimes there were some different sections, but it means something to me. Okay, so I've done that. This is really helpful. I know this seems a little bit like admin, but it's really, really important to organize your projects. I also, I need to explain a couple of things about the process here. So when I got some of the files, they were all kind of stemmed. I would explain, I would describe them as, so they were all in stereo. Okay, and some of them were already pre-panned. Okay, so I had a little bit of tidying up for demonstration purposes. What I mean by stereo is some of them are obviously properly stemmed. There was different information in the left and the right channels, but some of them were obviously mono tracks which were sent out as stems in stereo and then were panned, if that makes sense. So they had panning embedded in them. So I corrected some of that stuff. And, you know, that wasn't always ideal. As much as possible, I asked MusicLife Crypto to send me stuff without any effects on it, right? We'll get to some of why I think that's a good idea later, but unfortunately, although we tried, most of it is sort of fairly bare and we're going to add the effects later, but there are some tracks which have some sort of baked-in effects and it makes this non-ideal. But this is good, okay, because we don't always work in ideal situations. So we're just going to have to make the best of what we've got. So just as an idea, that's what's happening with this, that's what I've done so far with this track. Now, exactly as I did in last week's Fix My Mix, I've then kind of organised all of these tracks. I've colour-coded them. You can see the whole bunch of blue ones at the beginning there. I keep scrolling through. They're all vocals, okay? Can you see all those? There's in total 16 tracks which have vocals on them, okay? Different layers and things. We have one bass track there. In the original, the file I was sent, there was three or four different bass tracks and then they were sort of blended together with different sounds. I just scrapped the other ones and we're going to start from scratch with the bass. And then you can see all of these ones here in this kind of brownie-orangey colour there or drums and then moving along from there. We have quite a number of layered guitars here, okay? So all the way from here down to... What have we got here? Probably about nine tracks there of guitars layered, okay? So there's a lot going on there with guitars. That makes this mix a little complex because a lot of them are working in similar frequency ranges, okay? Not all of them, but some of them are. So we have to address that. And then there is four or a few synth tracks. There's some synth bass tracks and some regular synth tracks in there. And then kind of a piano, we'll call it a piano track there. I've also kept a reference here just on this last track. This is the whole song as it was mixed before because I've taken away quite a lot of the effects that are on there, especially delay, which was on the vocals, okay? And it actually plays an important part of the song but I've removed them for the time being because I prefer to start these mixes off without any actual effects on as far as I can. Somebody mentioned while I was noticing the live comments I didn't respond when I was doing last week's mix, they said, oh, the vocals sound a bit dry. The vocals sound a bit dry. Yes, you're going to hear that. This is going to get worse before it gets better, okay? Now, it's tempting, isn't it? Right away at this point to start to, you know, throw on lots of effects to make individual parts sound nicer. But I've just found through experience that generally that makes life a little bit hard, okay? In terms of achieving a basic balance, which is what we're going to be going for initially. Having said all of that, and having said we've got to this stage, there was a little stage that I missed last week and that's going to play an important role this week. And that is the kind of editing stage. We've done the gain stage, and I should say by the way, I've done a bunch of gain staging on this. But there's usually some editing which needs to be done on the tracks up here. We're going to talk about that in a moment and then we'll have a little water and we hear from our sponsor. One more time, DistroKid. Commit your music to the DistroKid spotlight feature. It gets entered into this competition where it gets played alongside other songs and people will vote for which of the two they see on the screen is their favorite. Now, the better you do in this process, the more likely you are to appear in one of DistroKid's playlists on Spotify. And that means your music's got a much better chance of being heard. So go ahead and select one of your songs. And then you've just got to select a 29-second clip. The best part of the song, it would be the best way to go with this. And you've got this nice sort of interactive feature here to do that. You simply then select the connect with Spotify button and you're away. I think editing is really one of those things which is, I'm going to say, a tedious task in many, many ways. But I still find it very, very necessary. It's one of those things, again, all of this preparation, if you think about this, just creates a good base for you to start your mix and it's going to make your mix so much easier if you do all these bits of preparation. So what do I mean by editing? Well, this is a bit of an unusual situation that we've got here because these songs, this is sent to me and these tracks are basically stems, yeah. You're more likely to have tracks which look something like, let me just quickly mock up what it would look like normally where you've started your takes like here, here and here, yeah. And you will have, let me get rid of those, one, two, three, I should have done this before the show, shouldn't I? You're going to have things like this, yeah. Little clips like this where you've recorded bits and pieces and where, you know, you've got some little bits of information at the beginning end of those clips. Now, do you have to go in and do what I'm going to do now and what I'll call top and tailing these, yeah. Getting rid of the dead space at the beginning and the end. Well, this is where I'm going to leave that up to you. I still do it. Now, back in the old days when I was a young lad, there was a lot more noise in recordings and there was little hisses and things like that and they all kind of built up, you know. So I was always keen to, if I wanted to create a nice, you know, recording, pristine recording, not so much pristine but nice clean recording, I would definitely go in and clean up all those things there. It doesn't matter on so much of a track by track basis, but it all kind of builds up in my opinion. So a couple of things about this, you saw me just sort of chop things up there, yeah. And then, you know, I'm just dragging that there up to roughly the beginning. Sometimes what can happen, we'll just see if it's happened there. I doubt it has. Have a listen to this. No one cares to listen. Okay, so what can happen is you can sometimes get little pops and clicks. Not so much these days. You used to have to be really careful about this a long time ago. So what's a good, a good thing to do is to get in there, zoom right in there, and then just do a little tiny, small as you like, crossfade. It just ensures that the beginning of the clip is at 0 dB. There's just no information there. That makes a nice smooth thing there. Let's find the beginning of that again. Another thing I'll mention in there is just his little breath is barely audible. Yeah, have a listen. Sometimes you can get rid of breaths up to you. Sometimes it sounds a bit more natural if you keep them in it. So I was drawing the crossfade in there, you know, but what you can also do if you're in Katewalk, like I am here, is go up to Options above the track view here and click on Auto Crossfade. And then when you go in and you start to do some editing, as I've done there, you can see it does an auto crossfade in there. So you won't need to sort of manually do that. So that's another thing that you can do. Let's undo that. Let's undo all of that, in fact. Go back, back, back, back. So that's one type of editing. Now it was mentioned in the comments earlier on that there could be a bit more tightness between the kick and the bass guitar on this song. I can't remember who mentioned it. It may have been Clayton, I think. And as I've now heard this song a little more, I have to agree with Clayton on this. Now, there's a, there's a degree to which that's fine. A little bit of looseness. But I think here and there it goes a little bit out on this song. So whilst I'm not going to do that right now, I do think it's worth mentioning that you could go in and move. It's probably some of the kicks in this song. Let's see if we can pick up any as a bit of an example. We'll go, I think maybe towards the beginning of the song. Let's have a listen. Yeah, there's like a point here, for example. Probably not maybe, but you may want to go in though and just fix up some of those things. Okay, that's just a matter of going to be a matter of zooming in on that kick. Let's find the kick here. In this case, it's audio. It's not MIDI. If this was MIDI, it's somewhat easier. But yeah, you can go in. Let me just zoom in a little bit here. I've lost my keys. I should go in with this. It's fine. And literally, you know, grabbing, you know, bits of kick drums like this and then moving them left to right, etc. I actually don't know. I just got this, I guess, what do you call that? An I-beam kind of a cursor there. And then just dragged it over. Yeah, like this. And then just shift it left or right. Okay, so definitely that may be something you might. So again, this is tedious. But if you want this to sound really nice and tight and good, then it's worth going in and fixing up these. So in this case, what I would do is not do it to every single kick. I don't think this song deserves that or needs that. It's not that type of song. But just here and there, if I listen again and I notice the probably three or four where it's very noticeable, I'd probably go in and adjust those. But that's not the type of editing that I'm going to focus on today. What I will be focusing on is the vocals. The vocals, in my opinion, I really like the vocals on this song. I was attracted to this song partly because of the vocal. Now it's partly because of the vocal delivery in actual fact that I really like it. And the tone of the voice I think is really good, really good for the song. However, in my opinion, here and there, I'm going to talk about a very controversial subject, it's a little pitchy. Now I know that some of you are philosophically against pitch correction and that's absolutely fine. Let's face it, this vocal, if it was recorded before any kind of pitch correction was available, may have just been left as it is because it's not that bad. Or we may have decided to re-record some parts here and there. So I'm of the mind that if the tool is available and the tool I'm going to be using is Melodyne, if that tool is available and can help it here and there, then use it. But as long as it doesn't sound sort of unnatural. I wouldn't want to make this vocal sound unnatural whatsoever. It just wouldn't be worth doing and if that was the result then I would re-record the vocal. But in this case I think that it's not too far out. I'm just going to be showing you how I go about that. And it's important, especially I feel you've got some layered vocals like we do here. So let's go through this section that I'm looking at here. We've got this main vocal, which is what you can see here. And if we look through the track we can see that we also have this one here by the looks of it which is one backing vocal, it goes at the same time. We've got another one here, another one here. And just in this little section here. I'm choosing this because I'm not actually going to go through whatever it was, 16 tracks of vocals doing Melodyne correction with you. So that's what we're going to be looking at. Just this little phrase here, let's have a listen. Okay, so that's what we're going to be doing with. Because this is going to sound a little bit richer and nicer when some of those vocals are just have their pitch just a little bit correct. So again, editing. So it's possible. Let's just have a look at this, this main vocal here, which is the one we're going to start off with. It's possible that this could have been sung in several takes. Okay, and which case these would normally be separate clips. But it's also possible that sometimes people like to sing all the way through and just leave it running and join in. So it could have been one track. But regardless, if you're working with Melodyne and you have a vocal like this where in the whole song you can see there's a section here where we have this vocal and there's a section here. There's a whole bunch of parts where there is no vocal. I think it's useful to chop it up when you're using Melodyne because, well, it processes everything much quicker to be honest with you in small chunks. It's not having to assess these bits. And I've just noticed the actual fact if we look at this vocal this is a good example. If we just play this section here, you probably can't see it. But something is there. There you go. I don't know how that's there or what's happened. There's been probably a bounce to tracks or something like that has happened or I don't think it's coming from the headphones. But anyway, you can hear that there's some guitar in there on this local track. So that would be definitely something I'll get rid of. All these little things actually matter. Those little extras that are there, those little extra noises I think they all matter. So there you go. I'm just taking a note. I'm just going to see what the produce I'll have to do this. I second doing Melodyne in smaller chunks also better for you. I agree with that as well. Now, I would normally probably Melodyne or look at Melodyne for these two chunks of this sort of main vocal here. But what I'm going to do today is just sort of focus on the sort of phrase that we've got here. So what I'm going to do because it's a bit tedious for you guys honestly to watch all of this. So I'm actually just going to chop this one off there as well. This is for no other reason other than Melodyne is going to process it a little bit quicker and easier. So let's have a look at this vocal first. So if you haven't used Melodyne before then it's worth noting that you may be tempted to go to the effects on your channel here. Go to insert audio effects. Go to solemnity and then click on the Melodyne plugin and insert it as a plugin. But that's definitely not the best way to use Melodyne in cakewalk and most other doors because this is able to be inserted on a clip where it's automatically going to get the information. It's user technology. I've forgotten the acronym now. Someone can tell me it's ARRA. I think ARRA technology or something like that. Anyway, so we're going to right click on this clip. We're going to go to region effects. There's a few different types of region effects. We go to Melodyne and we're going to click on create region effects. Okay, now it's going to do a few little bits and pieces there. It's wearing. It depends on how fast your computer is. It doesn't normally take this long, which is why I'm talking. Hope it hasn't crashed. Let's just sit here and wait and see if it hasn't crashed. Okay, now there we go. It's going to throw up. Let's get rid of this window which pops up. Often you're going to find that it's going to open up a web page. I don't know why it always does this. The very first time you use Melodyne in your project. So let's just get rid of all these windows that pop up. You didn't see, but it did pop up a web page. So close that off. Once you've done that, then what it's actually already done is because we've used on the clip here as a region effect, it's automatically grabbed the information there. You can see, or you probably can't see actually, that the clip now says Melodyne just as a prefix. So we can easily see where Melodyne has been used on there if you need to find that out later. And I am going to have a listen to our phrase here just to get an idea of what's going on. Okay, we're just going to deal with, I think, what should we do? Yep, that's what we're going to deal with today. Now Melodyne will try to detect the key signature of the song. And it's come up with E minor here and I know that's wrong. Why? Because I may have actually just done a little test run on this before. Possibly. The song is actually in B minor. It's probably been a little bit difficult for it to detect the key properly there, which is just not enough note information or what have you there, so it's come up with E minor. But it is B minor and that's going to be helpful because I've got this set up so that I'm going to be using only notes in the key of B minor. So let's have it listen and you see if you agree with me about what we can fix here. We'll just listen to this first little phrase. Okay, so I don't like to go in there and just grab all these notes and then double click on them and have them snap to notes. Okay, have a listen to that. Okay, it's subtle but it doesn't sound quite right to me. There's something not quite good there. So I like to focus on particular notes. This one stood out to me and we can visually see if you can see there that note is sitting like very much halfway between two notes there. Okay, and that's I like to use my ears first. Okay, so did that note stick out to me? Yes, it did. That was one of the main notes that stuck out to me. Have a listen, that's that high note here. Yeah, it's just not quite there. Sorry, music life crypto. We didn't quite make it there. It happens to all of us. I can promise you it happens to me all the time. I'm going to double click on that anyway and it gets right up there now. There is a slide there. See this slide? Don't worry about that. That's just a natural little human thing we've got in there. We don't really, I don't think we should correct that. The point is that the main note when he slides up there is now in pitch. Now I also like to, I tend to focus on some of the longer notes that are there. Okay, these ones like this one probably doesn't absolutely have to be corrected. But this one here probably. Yeah, this one that leads into it. Okay, let's have a listen. Why, I think that shorter notes like this, do you see these ones here? Yeah, they pass by areas so quickly that we don't quite detect the pitchiness of them so much. I might correct that one. Yeah, so it's like, we're just doing the ones which really, again, that stand out to us, stand out to our ears. Not visually, don't do that. It gets you into trouble. You end up with unnatural stuff. Just listen out for those ones that stand out. So let's have a listen again one more time. Okay, and again, I feel like this one here and maybe this one here I noticed and this one here. Just do those two. Okay, just a little nudges there. We're hardly doing anything. Now, just a note there. A delay effect. Okay, and that's something which we've sort of tried in preparing this track to get rid of any baked in effects. Unfortunately on this vocal, we still seem to have that sort of baked in effect. That is not ideal. If effects are baked in, the melody can get a bit confused. It's not in this case, but I would rather have that delay as a plugin, of course, and not baked in there. That's what we're dealing with. So that's what we're going to work with. So let's just have a listen to that phrase one more time. Yeah, it's just a nice little, people are saying in the comments, great voice. I agree. And it is hard because this is going to sound so much nicer, isn't it, when it's got a little bit of reverb on there when we've tidied up the vocals. But just as a performance, I think this is working pretty well. Okay. Now, for those of you who pitch correction skeptics, I'll call you that. That could be an acronym, couldn't it? For those PCSs out there, tell me, do you really think that this has changed the vocal so much that it now sounds unnatural or clinical or anything like that? I'd be surprised if you hold that opinion, but hey, it's your opinion. You're allowed to have it. You're allowed to hear from you on that. So that's that phrase done there. Where I think it begins to become very, very important, though, as I said, is when we start to look also at some of the harmonies. Let's have a look, listen to the first harmony that we've got in here. Just click on that. By the way, just in case you don't know, as I clicked on that track here, see the one I'm interested in talking about, see how it went all big there. And that's because I have this switched on in Kate Walk, Auto Track Zoom. My favourite features. I don't always have it switched on for all of my videos for various reasons, but I just like the fact that yet when I want to focus on this track, bang, I click on that and everything becomes bigger. Okay, just so you know. So let's have a listen to this harmony. Now, this is where I think it begins to get a little bit interesting because when you've got just a single vocal, if it's a little pitchy here and there, you are not going to notice it necessarily, but then when you start to add in some harmonies and one or two of those harmonies or maybe the main vocals are a bit pitchy, it could sort of get a little bit more obvious that it's been a bit pitchy. And I think it's starting to reveal itself a little bit here as it does with me too, with my vocals. And I'm sure most of you. Let's again just chop this one up using this split tool and then just go in there. And again, I'll just right click on that. Go to region effects, go to Melodyne. Great region effects. It worked a lot quicker that time, didn't it, than last time. Not quite sure why, but there you go. So we're going to sort of sometimes listen to this in isolation and sometimes listen to it with the original vocal. Okay, I'd see that it has picked up B minor. There's a key signature there this time, so I don't need to change that. Let's just have a listen to it with the lead vocal and see what my ears are picking up. Okay, so I think at the beginning here this bit, this one. Not sure where it should. I think maybe there. Hang on, this one. There we go. Yeah, there we go. Okay, we could maybe do these ones. I'm not quite sure. Let's have a look. I have to experiment. Okay, yeah, okay. I think that's an improvement. What do you think? I've got a year there from Mimo Japan. I'm not sure if it's a year to what I just said. Maybe not. I'll take it. Let's have a listen to a look at the comment here. Don't want pitch correction on professional singers. Perfect, okay. Yeah, I get where you're coming from, Kevin. It's interesting. When we sort of talk about professional singers and all that kind of thing, I know it's often said by people that professional singers will get it right. I happen to have some multi-tracks available. I got them years ago. But anyway, the multi-tracks of Bohemian Rhapsody, so I've got all of those. It's interesting because it's often held up as such a great song and obviously Freddie Mercury is held up as a great singer. He was a great singer. But I have to tell you, when you listen to some of those tracks in isolation, it's not all that sort of perfect, which may actually speak to your point a little bit, Kevin. You can't turn a bad song into a great song with pitch correction for sure. Performance is an enormous part of it. But I guess my point, Kevin, though, is that even great singers can be a little pitch at times, in my opinion anyway. There you go. Let's move on. So I'm hearing some music life crypto there improved and Doug is saying improved. Okay. It's good. I'm glad to hear that. So there we are. Let's have a listen to the second part of that. Maybe just in here. I'm not sure. Yep, just a slight improvement there. So that's all I'd be doing there. Again, you can see it tends to be on significant notes and it tends to be on some of the longer notes. I'm not normally going to touch all these little notes in here. So that's my philosophy on that. I think we've got a little bit of an improvement. Let's have a look at another one here. Moving on to this one. Let's actually just take out this one that we just did and have a listen. Okay, yeah. So this is an interesting one again. While I'm talking, I'll just chop this up and let Melodyne do its thing. The other thing that can happen and in some ways Kevin's comment speaks to this in terms of the amateur home recording artists. I think that we tend to be doing everything ourselves, don't we? Yeah. And what's happening here for Music Life Crypto is he's probably starting to sing a little bit out of his lower range here. I think obviously we can hear on the main vocal he's got a really, he's pretty capable of going reasonably high there. And this may just be on the end where it gets a little bit more difficult when you're in those lower parts of your range to hold the pitch. So I think it's happening there. Let's have a listen again. Okay, so this I'm just going to have a listen to all by itself. I think we've got a sort of a, what do you call this? There's a word for this, which I've forgotten a musical term, but it was kind of a drone thing going on there. Okay, let's just correct that one so I can. So it's important that these notes are really consistent in my opinion. Let's have a listen there. I've done it visually. I know without listening, it's naughty of me. In this case with this particular line. There we go. This one here. This one's a little bit more tricky, isn't it? Okay, there's ways that we could split this up and correct it, but I think we can sort of live with it. Okay, there was a slide up there, which is just a slowish slide. Okay, what you can do sometimes is go in and let me just find the tool. I'm not a Melodyne expert, by the way, folks, just so you know, looking for my tool tips here, note separation tool. So you could go in and kind of split that. It may not be resurrectable. Let's just have a look. Yeah, you see, and that's where again, I might do the note separation tool, go in there, split that one. It's starting to sound a bit unnatural, don't you reckon? I'll send my last goodbye. You're right, Andrew, right click once. Dear me, you can see how useless I am sometimes. So look, I mean, two minds about this because in isolation, I can hear that that now sounds a little unnatural. But I think because it's going to be underneath the other vocals and things, it should be okay. Let's have a listen to it with the lead vocal. Thanks for that, Doug. I'll just quickly do as you suggest. I've got to just open a couple of windows here. You're right, I should have asked about the level whether you guys are hearing it very well. So I'm just going to bring up my mixer. It's like this, folks. I'm new to the whole thing here. Oh, no, it's asking me for updates. I don't want to do updates. Okay, I'll drag that out the way so you guys can't see it. I'm just going to go to one moment, folks. Get in there and I'm just going to push that door volume up a little bit for you. There we go. Should be a little bit better now, Doug. I hope that's okay for you. So moving on, thank you, Doug. I think that that is an improvement. Let's just pop it in with the other vocal that we corrected. Well, I think we've got a decent improvement there, to be honest with you. And let's just do one last one, which is here in this little part. We've got a final little bit of vocal gain. We'll just drop up that phrase there. Then we'll go in, right-click, go to region effect, go to Melodyne, create region effect, okay? Now let's have a little listen to see what this one's all about. I can't remember this one, to be honest with you. Let's just have a listen to it all by itself. Ooh, I like this one. And even lower one in here. Again, not ideal that we've got a little bit of effects baked in there, but okay, we're going to work with what we've got. Let's go to Melodyne. A little bit again, I'll use that word again, droney. I mean that in a good way. And again, on this main note here, which is B, that's your sort of main drone note, I'm going to correct more. Yeah, just a little, there's not much correction in there. I think I'll leave all of the other ones. Okay, cool. It's working for me. Let's have a listen to that now with some of the others. Let's just bring in that other one that we just did, the other lower one. And then in with this one, I think it was. And then in with the main vocal. Now, I don't know about you, but I think that is an improvement. And it's something worth doing, especially because vocals are such a focus for our listeners. Yeah, there's something that in contemporary music, we're definitely going to hone in on. The vocals are a really important part of this particular song as well. I mean, again, it's something that's noticeable because it is a good performance. And because of that, I think it's an even better reason just to tweak it. So listen, it depends what you want from your music. Do you want to get, you know, better mixes? I'm afraid to say that that means there's going to be much more detailed work that has to go on if you want to really get it and raise it to that next level. And this is before we even really start mixing. So editing is very, very important. And I tend to do as much editing as I can before I start mixing. I think that it's worth, you know, thinking as I say about what you want, how much effort you want to put in. You can still do obviously do editing later. This is one of the beautiful things about, you know, doors and we've got this flexibility that we, you know, things are not baked in there. So you can obviously do it later. But as a matter of course, I tend to do it before the actual mix. It's already been quite a long show, folks. We're already over the hour long. So I'm going to finish off by doing what I did with my song last week. And that was the basic static mix. Because one thing I didn't explain at the beginning of the show, we just got rid of it. But by the way, I would obviously be doing this with all of the vocals, okay, all the way through. That could be a good few hours work, I would say. So I'm not going to do all of that now. I will do that before next week's show though, I think, because I'd like to do that to bring just to bring this up that level. Now, in last week's show, we talked about, you know, getting all of these tracks grouped in certain ways and then sending them over to buses. Because we have a total of 53 tracks in this song. That's a lot to manage if you want to work quickly and do a quick mix. Again, let me explain why I want to do quick mixes. It's basically to avoid ear fatigue. I want to move these as quickly as possible. Because if I'm in there just tweaking, tweaking, tweaking, you lose objectivity on mixes very, very quickly. So that is essentially why I like to work quickly. So in order to do that, you're going to need to be organized. So what I've actually ended up with is sending through all of those vocals, for example. In fact, we've got three main vocals. I put them at the beginning here. Those are the verse vocals, the bridge vocals and the chorus vocals. You've got those three. They all go through to one bus, right, which is vocals main. Yeah, we can see that here. That's at the end there. And then all of the other backing vocals are gone through to this bus here. Vox backing. OK, now we can see as well with all the other buses. I've got one bus just for the bass guitar. Doesn't really need a bus because it's one track at the moment. We are probably going to have some additional bass guitar tracks. But even if we only had one, it's just handy to have it going through to this bus. And it's here next to the drums. We've got one drum bus. We've got one bus for guitar solo, but I think that was made up of three guitars. If memory serves me correctly. We've also got another bus for distorted guitars. I haven't put all of these guitars in the same bus year. There are four different buses, chorus guitars and rhythm guitars. There was lots of separate tracks going into these buses. We also have one track for what is called the loom synth. We also have one track for the loom bass, which was actually made up of several tracks. We have one bus for the piano. And as I say, we've got those vocal tracks there. Now I've got a couple of red ones, bright red ones on the end there. I didn't do this last week, but I thought I would do it because it's something I sometimes do and I find useful. I also have all of what I've got is all of these instruments, anything non vocals. Yeah, I've got all of them buses going through to another bus, which is this one. Which almost recoloured it, which is called instruments. Yeah, it's in red there. And I've also got my vocals, which is my main vocals and my backing vocals going through to one bus. I've got two sort of special buses there, there's sort of sub mixes, I guess, which are just instruments and vocals. Vocals play such an important part in mixes like this that I've also found it handy just to have a one fader. And where I can control them or one fader fader as well, where I can control just all of the instruments, all of the backing. Yeah, I just find that another handy little workflow. And I'm glad to say that Andrew is here getting some good terminology. Yeah. So it's up to you how you want to work with this, but the more you can sort of simplify this down into as the terminology I was talking about there was sums. Then it's really, really handy to do that. Now, I did already do this with this track, but I'm going to demonstrate to you again what I would normally do at this stage. I did it last week, but I'm going to do it with this song so that you become familiar with it because we will be working with this next week. I'm going to grab all of these buses here. I've just selected the first one, hold shift and selected the last one. Yeah, you can see them all highlighted. I'm holding control on my keyboard and dragging down one of the faders so that all of those faders go down to zero. That's the way I like to start my mixes. And as I explained last week, many, many people will start off by getting a good sort of mix between the drums and the bass and sort of rhythm section. There may be some guitars and what have you in there. I know that most of you are probably going to do that and there's nothing wrong with it whatsoever. In fact, it's probably the right thing to do. But what I like to do is actually bring up the vocals first. In this case, I'm not going to bring up the backing vocals. I'm just going to bring up the lead vocals first. I like this is just a different perspective. You know, I guess it's a way of saying, look, the vocals are the most important thing. I'll just double click on the fader. Yeah, the vocals are the most important thing and I'm going to bring everything else up below them. Of course, you could bring the instruments up first and then bring put the vocals on top. But I find things get out of control when you do that. So look, it's just a different way of working. Then I'm going to pick a pretty kind of active part of the song from memory. I'm going to say down here. I've put it in a marker there as chorus. Did you have a listen? Okay, we've just got a little bit of vocals in there. There's not a whole bunch of vocals and the main one that we're listening to is this one, isn't it? But I'm going to bring this. I'm probably going to work with this part. I think it's one of the louder parts of the song from memory. Could be wrong actually. No, let's move up to here. It's this chorus here. Beg your pardon. Looking at all the other tracks, I can see there's a lot more activity on this one. So I'll work in this area, which means the main vocals that I'm working with are these ones. Yeah, okay. We'll go back to just at the beginning where they come in. I mean, really good vocal delivery there. So a good point there from Zelo. I do think it does depend on the genre. If that's referring to what I was talking about. Nice to see you by the way. Zelo in here. Great channel, folks. Check out Zelo's channel. He does some awesome cakewalk videos over there. He's done some good ones in the last couple of days. So let's work on this quickly. I did say it was going to be quickly denied. So I'm just going to do my thing now, folks. I'm going to create a quick static mix for this part of the song. I'm starting off with those vocals and then we'll bring in what I think is the kind of rhythm section underneath that. I have to say, the drums are kind of unusual in this song. There's not a consistent kind of hi-hat. Have a listen to the hi-hat. So personally, if I was working on this song in much more detail, music, life crypto may get some benefit. You might look at a more consistent hi-hat. It may tighten the whole song up a bit there. But that's what's there. Look, it's a creative choice that you may enjoy that performance as well. So there's a bit of a creative choice and depends on your preference. But that's what I would think about there. But anyway, I've got my basic sort of thing going on there. I'm just having a look now through these tracks to see where there's kind of a lot of activity happening. I can see some backing vocals. There's the drums. Let's just go and see what's happening with the guitars. So I can see that there's something happening with distorted guitars just at this section here. Let's have a listen. Okay, I'm just visually seeing what's here guys. And then just for example, I see some rhythm guitars coming in there. Okay, interesting. And I know there'll be some synths going on in there as well. So we'll listen to all of this lot together a little bit. Okay, I might just grab all of those from there to there. And then let's just take the solos off of those. And then I'm just going to drag them all down and bring them up again. It might be time to bring in those backing vocals as well. Let's just bring those up. I'm not sure quite what they're doing at that point. Let's have a listen to see what's happening with them there. Yeah, it's okay. Okay, so look, I'm sort of getting there with a basic mix. You can see what I'm doing there. There's so many details. I'm sure you're all hearing many, many details. These vocals are obviously going to benefit awesomely from some effects. I think there's a lot of things going on in the low end. Let's just have a listen to the bass drums. There's quite a bit of muddiness going on there. Those things can be tightened up. Okay, we need to look at that next week, but we will be looking at that next week. And obviously there's no panning on there at the moment. So there's not much of it. There is a bit of a stereo spread, but not too much. And the vocals, especially, you know, I mean, they're good, but they're going to benefit from a bit of processing. I'm pretty soon. So we're just looking for rough mixes. And then when we start to do all of those things, when we start to add in some of those plugins and do those things, then some of this mix is going to be adjusted anyway. So you don't really, at this point, want to get stuck into sort of spending too much time, too much detail on tweaking things at the moment. There's a couple of faders that I haven't brought up there. There's a solo guitar there, which hasn't been brought up yet. And then there's this loom bass and a piano. That's because those are existing in different parts of the song. I think anyway, I don't think there's yet. So I'll quickly look, you know how I see to choose the busiest part of the song and then get your static mix. But you might also just want to quickly get these levels up to somewhere near where they're going to be with some different parts of the song. So go to where that loom bass is. So I just need to find it, folks. Where are you loom bass? Where are you loom bass? So there's some interesting things happening there. Let's have a listen to that in solo. So nice, isn't it? Obviously reflecting a little bit of what the bass guitar is doing. And then let's find that piano as well. I'll just bring him up to a sort of a bit of a level. He's happening over here. Have a listen. Okay, cool. And then finally, I'll just bring up the level on the guitar solo, which is here to what's going on there. Okay, so they're just very rough levels. Okay, well, we've got that sort of mix to a listenable sort of balance. Okay, to go forward with. So once I've got this at this stage, which is kind of where we got to last week, as well, I would then start to delve into some of, for me, the way I like to do it is then start to focus on some of the key signature sounds which are going on. Okay, and as I mentioned, there's going to be the low end, which is the bass and the drums there. What's happening down there. It's all a bit boomy and muddy and lacking in tightness. Okay, down there. And then I think just for our own sanity's sake, we might start looking at working through the lead vocals especially and processing them a little bit just to give them that nicer glow. This is way before we get onto automation and going through the various different parts of this song. So I think we're going to have to leave it there. That took me about, what did I say, about 20 minutes to do that static mix. I will say one or two things about it. First of all, I don't normally mix on headphones. I've got nothing against people working on headphones whatsoever. If that's what they need to do and that's what life, or that's what works for you, then that's fine. But I prefer to use my monitors. So it's quite possible if I now listen to this on my monitors, that mix I've put there, certain other things would stand out to me. I can't really have monitors on when I'm using a microphone. So, yeah, you may be hearing some things a little bit different to me. But there is a rough mix, which I think is there. So let's say that we'll continue with this next week, where we will focus a little bit more on those things. Thank you so much for being with me and all of your comments, which is a bit difficult for me to read. Well, I'm in the middle of doing this, but I do see them there and I do very much appreciate you guys being there. I will be back the same time next week with another fix and a mix. Don't forget that if you have a mix which you would like to send in, you can follow the instructions for that in the description down below. Have a great day, night, afternoon, whatever it is for you.