 Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. Welcome to episode 31 of Fix My Mix, the show where we listen to music from the community and attempt to give advice as to how the mixes could be improved before you release that music to the world. And when you do release that music to the world, I very much hope you'll use the services of the sponsor of this show and that is DistroKid. If you follow this link in the description down below, you'll get a nice discount off of what already is quite a cheap service from DistroKid. You can release music to places like Spotify, iTunes, Google Play, Amazon Music, all those good places through a very easy to use service. We'll be hearing more about them later. Now today's show is a little bit special in a couple of different ways. First of all, I have to confess it's not completely live. I am live with you in the chat at the moment, but for various reasons, I had to pre-record this show this week. We're normally live, but I do apologize for that. I'll be back properly live next week, but do say hi to me in the chat and do make sure that when you're listening to the music in the show, you give your ideas and pieces of advice to the creators of the music because this is a community effort where we all get the chance to listen to music and sort of train our ears a little bit in this respect. So I hope that can be helpful to all of you in that way. Now the other way in which this show is special is we're going to be having a segment in the middle of the show here talking about a subject which so often comes up and that is gain versus volume or gain versus failure. Now I should mention this is not going to be about gain staging as such, a subject which gets talked about a lot in the community and I've already made several videos about that. So if you want to know about gain staging, you can just search my channel for that. However, we will be talking about gain, the gain part of it and how the fader works quite differently to the gain control and how that can really change your mix significantly. I see a lot of confusion about this in questions I've asked about gain staging. So I thought today it would be fun to tackle it with some practical examples so that we can really hear what's going on. Now let's start off by listening to the first song that we have up today and this was sent into me by the Chandler Brothers. It's a song called Never Too Late. They said in the email, hello Mike, hope this email finds you well. My name is Patrick and my brother's name is Sean. Together our artist's name is Chandler or Chandler Brothers, I'm not sure. And we've been watching your Fix My Mix shows and really appreciate what you're doing for the musical communities. As brothers living in opposite sides of the US, we collaborate using iOS devices in GarageBand to create original music. I reckon these two may have been watching Pete Johnson's channel a little bit. Good on you guys. He's a wealth of wisdom and knowledge about GarageBand. Must say it's a little intimidating watching the show as the talent is such top shelf material. We thought it wouldn't hurt to submit a track for consideration in an upcoming Fix My Mix show as we're always looking for advice and ways to improve our overall production. The track is called Never Too Late and conveys a young man's thoughts and desires concerning his relationships, wants, reservations, wishes and life in general. Thank you so much for your consideration and have a good day. Well this is sound the subject sounds really interesting to me so I think I will be paying some attention to the lyrics here. So let's have a listen to this song from the Chandler or Chandler Brothers called Never Too Late. Okay thank you so much to Patrick and Sean for sending that in. I've really enjoyed, I was kind of chilling out to that to be honest with you. I must admit I didn't really end up listening to the lyrics so much because I was listening to so many other things that were going on in that song but overall I really enjoyed the song and the performance as well. Some beautiful singing there, some great harmonies, some nice playing, some really nice playing on the guitar, some nice playing on the drums. I'm assuming this was live drums. If this was programmed drums then it was done extremely well in my opinion but I'm pretty sure it was live drums anyway and we're going to get to some of those things in a moment but overall I liked it. So let me talk about some of the things I think could actually be improved and to be honest with you there's a reasonably minor although you know I think they're at the same time reasonably noticeable as well for me anyway listening in these headphones. So first of all the drums had a really great sound to them. I thought they were balanced. They were in just about the right place in the mix. They could possibly come up a little bit. We'll talk about that later but I thought they were a little too dry to be honest with you. We were hearing quite a lot of reverb on the vocals and also on the guitars sometimes as well. So for me the drums sounded like they were recorded in a completely different place indeed given your email I guess they were but it sounds like that as well. So Pete Johns who I mentioned earlier is often talking about this how you can use sort of one reverb and then sort of use it with everything and that kind of glues things together as if they're in the same room that's something you could try or you could use an individual reverb. I would say almost on the overall drums although I almost kind of never do that anyway depends how you've recorded it but yeah just a little bit more on the drums a little bit wetter but I really liked the drum sound overall I have to say. There was some really nice guitar work going left and on the left and right yeah there was a couple of arpeggiated electric guitars going on there really nicely done really sort of tasteful for the song but there were times where I felt they overpowered the vocal a little bit. So I definitely think there's some automation could be done here so certainly like in the intro and in the in between sections they weren't too loud they were kind of quite nice in my opinion but they seem to be just overpowering the vocals at times and the vocals were great I mean you really sort of want them to shine. I don't really have any advice on the sound of the vocals they sounded just really nice to me just to be honest with you. The guitars though I will say just one more thing about them they were it's got an almost a nice sound for me but especially the lead guitar what became apparent to me and I could be totally wrong about this okay you can you can let me know but my feeling was of hearing a DI'd guitar a little bit okay so I'm interested as to how you recorded this did you plug directly into your interface and then use an amp sim and sort of blend in because I was kind of hearing that attack that you get sometimes it's just a guitar which just plugs straight in. You can get away with it a little bit I mean bass sure DI no problem don't need a bass amp sim really a lot of the time you can but with the guitars look maybe it's a taste thing but just a little bit there I felt like I wanted to hear those guitars be in the room a bit more or in a room as if a cab was miked up more so than sort of directly in my ears is that I hope that doesn't come across wrong overall I like the guitar I love the guitars actually but yeah just a little thing there so I'd be interested maybe you can let me know Patrick and Sean whether I'm right about that whether you use the DI there could be wrong um now that was all very good I always seem to bring this up it's not a mix thing okay but just here and there a little bit the timing was just a little bit loose okay I could almost sense that you had recorded it on separate parts of the inseparate ends of your country um it wasn't awful it wasn't really I've we've had worse on the show um some people may not mind it I just thought it was a little bit out here and there it wasn't anyone's particular performance either the only thing and again let me know how you did this I'm interested to know did you record the guitars first and then have the drummer play along with the guitar I'm still assuming this is a real drum of course play along with the guitars that's kind of what it sounded like to me and it's I think it might be hard for a guitar for a drummer to keep perfect time with these guitars the way they were played so what I would suggest is it may help is you can do it that way around but I would treat the guitars as a guide track so the drummer knows where they are in the song I would then once you've got that drum track probably re-record those guitars and just try and get the timing a little tighter with the drums the drums sounded pretty kind of on the ball for me um but overall um you know I think it's worth taking a look at those issues in that song it's a lovely song um and you know I really I really do believe that um if you just take a look at a few of those issues then you've got a really really good recording here um and of course when you do complete that I hope you will use our sponsor DistroKid to release your music let's hear a little bit about some of their services now so 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 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 so as I mentioned earlier I see a lot of confusion in the community about the difference between gain and volume or more specifically the difference between using the gain controls and using the fader controls for volume and if you don't understand the difference between these two things then you could get results that you can't predict and that could mess up your mixes it's incredibly important to understand the difference I'm going to start off by demonstrating why I think people get confused about this okay so I'm going into Cakewalk and I've got this project loaded up which I actually shared with the community just the other day I'll put a link for it in the description down below you can download this project and use it in Cakewalk yourself if you want to follow along with things like this I'm going to be focusing on this track here which is colored in red now in the project when you download it it's not colored in red I've changed it here and the particular track is track three here it's got the name of kick side trigger normally this is turned all the way down because I'm actually just using it to trigger some side chain compression but in this case I've turned this up so that the fader is on zero okay and I've colored it red as well also you should note that at the top of this channel the gain control is also set to zero okay so everything is set to sort of it's it's natural state so we're going to hear this kick drum at its natural volume so I'm just going to play that quickly now okay now if we take a look at the meter down here or just below the meter we can see where this peaked at and it peaked at minus 6 dB remember that minus 6 and remember the way we measure decibels is zero if we go above zero things will start to clip but we measure everything else as a negative number yes so this is six decibels below zero minus six okay now I'm going to start off by changing the the level of this what you might often call the volume by using the gain control I'm going to go up to my gain control at the top of this channel and I'm going to turn it down by exactly two decibels okay we can see that there let's reset this meter and play that kick again okay and we can see it's now peaking at minus eight decibels yeah minus six minus two comes to minus eight okay hope you're following that so just remember the result we got when we did minus two in the gain was eight minus eight decibels okay so let's reset that gain and this time rather than use the gain to lower the volume we're going to use the fader okay so we're actually going to type in the value here of minus two okay so our fader is at minus two decibels and if we reset the meter and play the drum again we get exactly the same result yeah we went from minus six to minus eight in both cases we use the control the gain control in the first case to reduce it by two in the second case we use the fader control to reduce it by two and that I think is where the confusion starts to occur because people start to think will these have the same result we could use you know our gain control to mix our song for example just leave all the faders there at unity we could do that and that would be fine but you should really understand what's happening to your mix if you do that because this was all happening in a vacuum if you like this is with no effects in between but of course in our songs we tend to use effects in between either the pro channel or as inserts so let's explore what happens when we start to use effects I'm going to close this project now and load up another one so same project there's a slightly different version of it okay and I've got this set up when it finally loads how long does it take for this project to load for you let me know I've got this set up so that we're now going to be listening to this female vocal here okay and what we're going to focus on is this effect that we have here we have this compressor inserted here okay I'm going to go ahead and set the gain at the top again back to zero so I'll double click on it and it's set to zero and the fader is also on zero and as I play the beginning of this vocal I want you to see what's happening with this compression by looking at its needle here okay and you can see there we'll just look again it's it's going down to about minus 5 dB in terms of signal reduction on that compressor okay cool let's now lower the volume of this significantly let's go all the way down here with the fader I don't know we're about minus 17 that's that's fine let's play this track again and now have a look at what's happening with that compressor okay we can definitely hear that the track sounds quieter but what's happening with that needle look again we've still got minus 5 dB there of compression there's been no change in the amount of compression on this song yes we've made it sound quieter but the dynamic range the difference between the quietest and the loudest part of this vocal hasn't actually changed okay now let's put that fader back to zero now let's do that sort of drastic reduction in volume but this time we're going to use the gain control okay we're going down to about minus 17 again okay remember when we did this to the kick drum they they both had exactly the same result right well they may sound reasonably similar but let's have a look and see what's happening now to that compressor no nothing happening there okay it's just not getting enough signal to actually do any compression that means it's got the widest possible dynamic range on this song it hasn't squashed that vocal at all okay so that can lead to problems yeah because you know parts of the vocal which you know are peaking and we want the momentarily to come down and now not going to come down okay we think we've done the same thing by adjusting the gain instead of the fader but the effect on just this one compressor here is quite significant now importantly with a compressor like this which is based on an la to a opto compressor okay it doesn't just do compression at a certain point when it gets enough input or enough gain it'll actually do things like add saturation okay harmonic distortion things like that so the character of the actual sound is going to change by using the gain control not just the volume if that isn't clear enough to you at the moment i'm going to use a third example where i think that's going to become crystal clear okay so we'll close this down and this time i've set it up with our third example to be using electric guitars okay now the electric guitars on this track are using the free amp sim which comes with cakewalk okay so th3 now normally these are all the the electric guitars the electric guitar is in stereo left and right but i'm just going to concentrate on one at the moment and i've just put it to the middle so it's not panned either way okay we just have a quick listen and what you're hearing there is a slightly slightly out of tune there's a slightly over driven guitar yeah okay so it's not a clean guitar it's ever so slightly over driven that's the sound that i wanted okay let's change the volume of this or the level of this using the failure let's just turn it down quite a long way again we'll go that minus 17 or so okay have a listen to this guitar now i know it's a lot quieter but what you're still hearing is a slightly over driven electric guitar yeah have a listen again okay so let's put that failure back up and this time let's use the gain control i'm going to grab this gain control and again we're going to go to round about minus 17 okay listen again it's going to be quiet again so i want you to listen carefully it's an almost dry guitar okay we're not hearing the same amount of overdrive at all because the plug-in in this case th3 is not receiving enough signal for the virtual circuits in the amps to start to add some distortion okay that nice distortion that we're looking for okay i'm going to demonstrate this even further with another area in uh cakewalk but also in other doors um where we use gain but maybe not by using this gain control here and that is with um some different types of automation okay so we've got our tracks here i am actually going to go back to the console and for this demonstration i'm just going to turn that gain up a little bit okay i'm going to go to plus eight okay let's have a listen to that guitar now it's quite a lot more over driven okay that's what i wanted because i'll definitely want to be able to hear that it's over driven now i've got that particular track here and i'm going to duplicate it okay so i'll just duplicate and i'll duplicate events so we've got an exact copy okay these two here when my mouse is here but we're going to change their level in two different ways with automation okay so with the first one at the top here we'll solo this we are going to change the the level using uh volume automation this is the equivalent of changing the level of the fader okay so at the beginning we'll just start off at zero we'll let it go for a few seconds there and then we'll turn it down in fact i'll do an exact amount okay i'll just go to properties for here and i'll just do minus 17 so we know we're doing just the same for these two examples okay so there we have a guitar starts off loud and gets quieter we'll listen to it in a moment now we'll go to our second example which is here and we are this time going to automate gain okay now this is actually called clip gain so it's happening at the level of the clip even before it hits that gain control yeah that we had in the channel okay so it's important to understand that we will go to clip automation here and we'll click on gain okay again we'll start off at zero at the same time we'll stay at zero and then here we will go down and let's as i say we'll just do that exactly type in minus 17 okay so we have identical tracks but they're being automated in two different ways the first one is using the fader volume automation and the second one is doing gain automation okay let's listen to the first one the fader keep listening what we heard there was a very over driven guitar we're quite reasonably over driven guitar and it stayed reasonably over driven yeah even though it got quieter so this section here yeah it's still over driven reasonably well so let's now go to the other example where we use gain automation to mix our guitar have a listen there tiny amount of overdrive there but it's almost a clean guitar let's listen to those last sections especially we'll just compare the two okay we'll listen to the first one and then the second one very very different results okay not so different in terms of levels yeah but very very different in terms of actual sound and that's why this is key to understand because you can't change the tone of your instrument by using the fader you can make it quieter or louder i say they were a little bit of caution but let's just talk about it in terms of a channel so you're not going to change the tone using the fader but you can change the tone dramatically by using the gain controls now why was i cautious then when i said you can't if that channel was then going into a bus which also has some effects on that bus then adjusting the fader could in fact effect you know how hard you're hitting that bus of course so in that respect but essentially that's the main difference that you want to keep in mind so if you just want to change the volume of something in your mix um then you would use the fader i'm not saying that you can't i'm not saying at all that you shouldn't use gain automation not not saying that at all remember that i'm not saying you shouldn't do what i've done this second example but i should i want you to be aware of the effect you are having you're not just changing the level or the volume if you have plugins in there which are going to respond to different levels you will change the tone of your instruments as well as changing the level so it's highly important to understand that difference not to get confused about it if you are confused about it and you're just using one method one day and it may feel like the whole thing is a little bit of a wheel of fortune talking about wheel of fortune let's hear from our sponsor distro kid so one of the ways to actually get your music heard on spotify is to get onto a playlist now distro kid offers a really fun way to get onto one of their playlist with their wheel of playlist feature simply head over to your distro kid account go to the top right where it says goodies then go down to wheel of playlist and then you start off simply by selecting a song something you've already released and then click on connect with spotify now obviously the further up a playlist you get the more likely people are to actually hear your music and enjoy it so what distro kid do here with this feature is they give you three chances to spin a wheel a kind of a wheel of fortune type of thing going on here now the best result of those three spins determines your number in the playlist and as I say the higher up you are the better so on this occasion I achieved 1088 you can try every every day if you like so maybe that's something you'd like to do to actually get your music in a playlist on spotify okay let's listen to some more music our second song today is from a viewer called Ray I don't have Ray's surname so it's just Ray and the song is called the chase now Ray says it's called the chase and is influenced by my love of rock blues with Hammond and brass okay nice combination I wanted to try something simple for my first attempt so this is an instrumental based on a 12 bar 145 progression I have no collaborators so I don't know if this is a good result but I have programmed all the instruments and played the guitar parts myself okay many hours with addictive drums trying to create a human but not professional drum fill cakewalks slot plugins are almost exclusive exclusively except a bit of ozone to bring it up to a reasonable level and a great plugin is to use as well thank you for inspiring me to get off my ass and give it a go in regards right about here that right so let's have a listen to Ray's song here um the chase okay let oh well that was that was fun to listen to I have to say first of all um let's start off with the good stuff about this and and Ray you know if this is one of your first attempts attempts I think at a while from or a member from the rest of your email then you're off to a flying start in terms of mix okay I just want to talk purely well not to you I've never talked purely about mix but let's talk about the mix overall sort of balance and things um there was a lot of good stuff here okay you you do understand balance um especially for this type of music okay for some other genres of music this might not have been a great mix but I think it was good here for what I mean for example is the bass was there it was reasonably solid for me um but for other genres of music you may want a more pumpy bass or you know but I thought this was okay I thought it was okay wonderful guitar work lovely use of panning um drum programming um to get them to sound real is still a time consuming thing in my opinion there's real no real shortcuts and I think I think you did a really really good job okay it's it it's like you know it would improve if there was a real drummer there um but this didn't sound sort of rigid or too you know what can happen sometimes is people just copying past the sections across and they don't pay attention to detail and it all sounds too mechanical that didn't sound like that so good work on the drums and for me at least in these headphones I don't have a lot to say about the drum mix maybe could come up a bit but maybe not you'd have to try them um the sound of the Hammond was really nice again as well and there was a lot of nice panning going on okay you use the space the stereo spread was really well done stand out was the guitar work I have to say you're a good guitar player and um you know you you chose the right parts for this sort of music anyway well played on that one um so that really sort of leaves one of your goals for this because you said you know you like the sort of rock blues with Hammond and brass and that leaves the brass okay so in terms of the mix I guess the brass was okay um but as I've talked about um on the show before um the sound of this uh as a virtual instrument and I'm not sure which one you were using didn't it didn't sound quite like real brass still okay um and even though you made a good attempt there was some nice brass swells going on okay you didn't just play this on the keyboard there was some attention to detail on things like the swells um the use of harmony with the brass was good you were using the kind of stabs that are used in this kind of music um and that was fine but I'm afraid to tell you I can only point to the problem of this and not give you a solution apart from which library I thought I may have mentioned before I think it's big fish audio um do something called vintage horns which I've sometimes used and I find those to be the best they're not particularly cheap from memory but um they're the best that's the brass the best brass that I've come across in my opinion okay there's session brass and stuff from native instruments and not too bad um but how how how do I think you could attempt this with what you've got you know without just going out and buying a new library um I think the brass was a little dry first of all okay I think reverb could help this a lot okay it's just gonna make that brass a little less harsh and it was a little harsh at times you know weirdly you may want the brass to be harsh you may want that sort of almost natural distortion that you can get from a brass stab sometimes but it was just something in there which was sizzling in the wrong place okay the upper mids is is where I'm going to sort of describe it um so a little bit of eq to get rid of some of that harshness up there and uh some experimentations in both delay a short slapback delay just one delay slapback and then reverb I think it's going to help this to sort of sit in the mix a little bit more and get rid of that unknown I don't think you're going to get so far with it to be honest with you though um but have a go see how far you can go um with it I still think that the actual sound of the virtual instrument there is probably not quite up to scratch but this is fixed my mix in terms of your ability to mix this I think a good job good thumbs up here I think you definitely on the right track with your mixing so that's all I've got to say about that um I'm sorry I wasn't here live today I will be here live and in person um this time next week I do hope that the little mini tutorial about gain and volume was helpful to you and if any of you were confused about that hopefully it cleared up some confusion it do experiment with this if you haven't got that project file I encourage you to download it um and then try and recreate what I was doing there and um hopefully that will really help you to improve your mixes because you'll understand what's really happening in the relationship between gain and volume thank you so much for being here especially in the live chat but if you're on the replay as well um thank you also for being here make sure you hit the like button give me a thumbs up and if you haven't subscribed do that for me and I will see you next week