 Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you are welcome to episode 24 of Fix My Mix, the show where we listen to some mixes from the community and we give our critique. Now the purpose of that is so that we can not only give our critique and help those people improve those mixes, but also because we can all practice together using our ears and our critical thinking to decide how we're going to decide how to make particular decisions about mixes. I'm really nervous about today's show, I've got to tell you, I'll get to that in a moment, but first of all let me just say a thank you to the sponsor of the show, DistroKid. If you follow that link in the description then you can get a 7% discount off signing up for DistroKid. It's already only $19.99 a year and if you are releasing your own material you won't have to pay another cent. You can release as many songs as you like and it's going to go out to all the places, you know, to places like, I forgot the names of the places, Spotify, iTunes, Google Play etc. That's the names of the places. Nice to see people here in the live chat of course, I'm going to say hi to a few of them. We have, who have we got here? We have Neil Pickard from England, nice to hear you. How do you binge watch on, hey? I binge watch on British history for some reason at the moment, so yeah, I've been doing a lot of, it's very, very interesting, the Battle of Agincourt, the Battle of Trafalgar, there's a lot of battles in British history, anyway, nice to see you here Neil. We have Mimo Japan, I didn't know you were going to be here today Mimo, that's something Doug told me you might not be here but nice to see you here, I hope things are all very well over there in Tokyo. We have, oh, we have, hello Mike, always a class out, I just released my new song today on Distro. Good to hear that, we've seen it on the channel before, Sam Jr. music, Sam, that's awesome, you can pop a link if you like, we'd love to see that or hear that I should say. We have Danny Gable as usual, nice to see you Danny, thanks for being here again, we have Rock here. Some of these people have just come over from studio live today, Pete has had Dan, the lonely rocker over there today, I watched almost the whole stream right up until the last moment and was having a fine time, I learned one or two things about Dan that I didn't know in actual fact, did you know he's a Rush fan, I knew that, I knew he's a Rush fan but anyway, I learned some other things that I didn't know, nice to see Ricky T Brown in here from the home recording studio though, there was so much came up in Pete's show today, I urge you to watch the replay of it, it was just a really interesting conversation between two of my favourite people I have to say, really, really enjoyed it. Why am I so nervous about today? Well we are going to listen to a mix from the community today but I alluded to this on last week's show where I said hey, wouldn't it be a good idea to actually do some mixing on the show of some of the mixes from the community, that sounded like a good idea but I actually have to actually execute it which is not so easily done, we'll get into that in a moment. So I want to say thank you to Music Life Crypto, we had a song there from sent in last week which we played on the show and I said I'd like to remix this one. Now during the course of the week he has attempted with me to send me the multi-tracks and things like that and to cut along the story short, we ran out of time and I was a bit late in messaging him about a couple of things because you know things that we didn't need to get right before we used it and right up until last night we were doing a bit of communication on that and I sort of pulled the plug a little bit because we were having some technical issues which I didn't have time to resolve before the show. So I went to my plan B which is to use one of my songs which was ready at least for this first stage of mixing that we're going to talk about. Now that's a bit of a long roundabout way of telling you that on next week's show when we continue this process we will be using Music Life Crypto's song. That's a bit confusing. At this stage it doesn't matter because today we're going to be talking about organising mixes and things like that a little bit as well as some early stages of mixing. But thank you Music Life Crypto for going through the process so far but we will be using a slightly different song to start off with as we talk about hands-on mixing. Now why am I nervous because I'm doing this show in a completely different way. It may look as normal but the technical side of sharing a cakewalk screen, sharing the sound from it, I'm nervous because there's so many things that can go wrong. It could end up being like one of those Zoom meetings that I'm sure you've all been a part of where I was like, can't hear your audio, no there's feedback. There's all sorts of things can go wrong in these situations and probably so do bear with me, we'll do a little sound check later but I'm very sort of impressed by people like Pete Johns who do this kind of thing all the time in actual fact they were easy saying hi. Don't forget to check out his channel as I say and watch that interview with Dan the Lonely Rocker. Now just to ease myself into this we're going to do the usual thing and just listen to one of the songs that's been sent in first. So this is the only mix that we'll be listening to from the community today and then we'll go on to a little bit of mixing and you can ask me questions about what I'm doing etc. It's going to be lovely and interactive and all that stuff but first of all let's have a listen to a mix from the community. We have something from, I hope I say this correctly, hang on, on my multiple screens here. Can I, oh no I forgot to prepare that. I won't forget that part. I'll just say Johan Brintesson close to midnight as the name of this song. He said we'd be thrilled if this little ditty would be considered for reviewing. I find mixing is my weakest spot and I do very little apart from levels and automations. The song stems from basically that's what we're going to be covering in today's fix my mixed hands on but anyway the song stems from the baseline in the chorus which I thought of while driving last Monday. This is fresh stuff. This is a virgin mix. Fumbled up my phone and hummed it into there. I've done that before I must say I do usually try to pull over. I always pull over usually. I pull over but yeah you forget that idea. Aren't phones great? You can just capture those ideas in the moment. So I often do that. I'm in the car that's where for some reason when I'm driving I think of things and I go hum it in. You know then I grew from that simple idea during a few days. The style sort of gave itself gave itself. The lyrics are somewhat more pessimistic than I usually am but they seem to fit the mood. So the song is called close to midnight and this is yeah fresh hot off the press. Don't forget to give your comments in the live chat about what you think about what you're hearing. Let's have a listen. See it's already gone wrong. That was cakewalk screen. That wasn't his song. Let's try again. Well that was a nice start to the show. I've only listened to the first few bars of it actually before the show so this is the first time I've heard all the way through and I really actually just put me in a good mood. I like the sort of main hook. The close to midnight thing. That's really nice. So first of all amazing considering that this was only created last Monday or you only had the idea last Monday. You've sort of obviously jumped in and put all this together very very quickly. I like the opening. I like there was a nice pad string kind of sound at the beginning there Johan and then suddenly everything changed and it was one of those tracks. It was almost it's sort of close-ish to Prog Rock or that sort of era at least anyway. There's a lot more music produced like this back in the day in in the 70s, mid 70s, late 70s etc and you know with this kind of thing. So overall I really really enjoyed it. The vocals to me at times were undersold. Rikki T Brown from Home Studio from the Home Recording Studios and I'll get it right one day Rikki was saying that you know he felt that they needed to be louder vocals. I think it might not be a volume thing. You mentioned Johan that you're sort of a levels and automation guy and I think sometimes the vocals just needed more presence. So you might you might get accomplish that with by adjusting the EQ rather than adjusting the volume. Perhaps in the high mids around about that area you might want to do a boost. It's funny with vocals. We talked about this a week before. It's tempting to do like a smiley face or sort of a scooped EQ for things like vocals just to make them sound nice but they can get completely lost in the mix when you do that. They need some sort of presence often in the mids. Well depending on the vocalist anyway but and that's what I would suggest for this one. Now also someone said in the chat that the whole track appeared to be missing the highs a little bit and I think that I agree with that. I think the overall sort of EQ if you like was it just needed a little bit more sparkle in the high end. However I'm gonna throw a spanner in the works. Before you do any of that I would really record pretty much the whole thing. Oh my god what did I just say. And that's because this is a really good song. It's worth I think this is a demo to be honest with you and I think it's worth doing properly and specifically this is gonna comes down to some of the timing issues in there. There was a couple of loose drum fills which I don't mind at all but I thought that there was some timing on the one of the bar here and there where it was scattered between drums bass guitar whatever where it rather than go it one of them like this and I think for this style of music it's expected that it's going to be a lot tighter than that and I although you go in and do some editing and push things around quite a lot I wouldn't bother. I think if you've recorded it this quickly in this amount of time I would just re-record it and really focus on some of those things okay and getting that tight. It sounds like you're a capable musician. It sounds like that you're able to do that and it may be that you just sort of that you that you were just doing this in a hurry. Sorry not sausage thank you sausage for agreeing with me but we have Sam John music. Can you explain the difference between a demo and a professional release? Well I guess there's a lot to it. I'll tell you what things have changed so much haven't they these days me me and me are doing you know the recording the engineering the production the album and everything so on a professional level you know there's going to be multi multiple people you know taking care of their specialities in a professional release but I in in this case the reason I'm describing this as a demo is I've done this before where you can quickly in fact this is a good point in that the song we're going to be looking at in the moment is actually a demo rather than what I regard as something I'm going to release but it'll get to that in a moment. So sometimes it's good idea just to throw the whole track together really quickly like this just to get like a proof of concept. Is it going to work in terms of the arrangement in terms of though you have all fear of the song that is normally what a demo is going to be about okay but the proper recording you're going to put a lot more care into it right from the tracking stage all the way through it's just it's just a matter of a level of care once in a while demos do become released products. I believe and and I can't remember where I saw this but if you remember Adele's song her biggest song probably someone like you initially they recorded a demo her singing with a piano and then they decided yes this is going to be a good song let's do the whole thing and apparently they went ahead and re-recorded it and then put a whole orchestra on there and all kinds of instrumentation and and decided in the end to release what was more like the demo more or less just vocal and piano so yeah that's that's sometimes can happen but yeah with this particular song I think the proof of concept is there I really enjoyed the song very much I think the overall arrangement yes I like it there was some good guitar tone sounds in there as well by the way I like that so I wouldn't change anything about the arrangement individual elements in terms of sounds or good I reckon but you just want to go ahead and actually refine the performance in this case okay that's it's a bit of an unusual I don't normally suggest people start from scratch but in this case very much worth it and I'm sure that's going to be a great product now while I prepare for the next phase of this special show that we're doing today and by the way it's lovely to see Dan the Lonely Rocker in there he's just appeared today as a to demos of today are definitely not like the old days they can be pushed forward to the for absolutely agree Dan like that can happen now I'm going to go I'm not going to do a a spontaneous jingle today we'll do that next week it's too much for me to take on I'm not that good at multitasking believe it or not but well let's go to a word from our sponsor not a word from our sponsor a word from me about our sponsor Disro Kid and see what's involved in actually releasing a song you want to release your music via Disro Kid 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 Disro Kid 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 Disro Kid 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 talking of demos it's actually a demo that we're going to be working with today I want to run you through the process of what I'm doing at the beginning of a project to prepare for the initial static mix going smoothly now what do I mean by static mix this is a sort of mix which is not moving it hasn't got automation it's just the basic levels okay that's the sort of first goal of the mixing process so I told you the story at the beginning of this video about how in the last minute we couldn't actually go ahead and use the track I wanted to use although we will be using that next week and instead I quickly grabbed a track which has been sitting on my computer for two or three months and or more than that actually I've lost track of time but anyway it's been sitting there and it just happened to be at an estate with one of the early files where I could quite easily demonstrate what I want to demonstrate with you today and this is how how I go about actually preparing a mix now the song itself that all the this was intentionally a demo okay I don't always intentionally make demos but this was intentionally a demo the purpose of this is because I knew that I was going to have real drums on it okay and I wanted to make a demo for the drummer the drummer being Ed Thorne I have one of his sweatshirts on today look it's very very warm actually for a cold Perth morning I like this one I don't I know that Ed doesn't watch my shows but in case he ever does there's one of his shirts check out Ed Thorne he's got a great channel now he's he has already in fact recorded the drums for this but this was the track that I sent him now I wanted him to have something which was going to represent in some way the final track so that he just feel like he's playing along with the band yeah I didn't want him to have to record in isolation but I have to say that all of the the instruments on here the guitar the the bass the vocal performances were all intended as I that'll do that's fine and I'm personally not very proud of them because I think that particularly the guitar by the way we'll get to that but it's enough for me to demonstrate to you how I set up a mix let's just have a quick listen to the actual song it's written by me Susie singing on it so it's just a few minutes long and you can tell me what you think is wrong with the mix there's plenty wrong with the mix but go ahead and tell me let's have a listen to that now okay let's get down to business here thank you for your kind comments too kind I'm sure but as I say it's a demo but we can work with it it's enough to sort of demonstrate the principles of what we're going to talk about can you all do me a favor the chat is about 10 seconds behind so I'm going to wait for you but let's just do a quick sound check okay I've got my cakewalk screen up here let's just pop myself over to the side here I'm just going to play a few seconds here from the middle of the track I'll hit the play button just let me know that you can hear the sound okay okay hopefully you heard that you can let me know in the chat I'll just have a quick look on the live chat over there da da da da waiting for all the good folks I'm sure Doug will be the first go on Doug did you hear that good good good good good we're away then we're away so what we're seeing here is the project now there's a few things that I've done to prepare this project just to make sure and by the way the details are not too important here this is about process okay so you're not going to be able to easily see every single individual button that I'm pressing here not too important to be honest with you but here is the project first of all well organized is what I like to be because I've said it many times on the show my approach is to try and do this static mix as quickly as possible but it's one of those things where you I may do the mix in 20 minutes or what have you but I prepare for four hours beforehand so I've mentioned what I mean by organization many times on the show before but I'll do it quickly now first of all I have my tracks named at the bottom so I can see what everything is clearly okay so I can see that this is a guitar left and a guitar right and then I've got Susie's vocals my vocals I've got some bass guitar in there both a di and a bass amp which we'll get to later I have my drums on all the green tracks here I can see they're all the drums because they're all green and they group together in that way okay so I've colored things I have a b3 organ in there I have some electric guitars for electric guitars grouped there in a sort of a weird mustard yellow color I have some keys piano in purple and I have some strings okay that's the whole track that's what it's made up of not too many things but you can see that I can quickly and easily identify certain things because they're color coordinated and also I like to use a little featuring in cake work where you can actually use a picture as well I'm a kind of a visual person as it turns out so I can easily spot where my guitars and my bass and my drums are because it's nice little pictures there I know in places like GarageBand you can do that easily but there you go yes folks I know it's a little blurry we'll have to we'll have to move on now um Mimo is just touching on something there Mimo we're going to have to get together on this because Mimo has been a little critical of any he's right to do so of some of my organ work um so hopefully we'll get a chance for Mimo and me to get together and he can play with my organ and spice it up a little bit there's more Dubra and Tondra's in that sentence and you'll find on a show with me and Pete Johns I can tell you anyway um so that's that's the first step here the other thing I want to quickly mention is is markers I'm a big believer in markers you can't see here but at the top of the screen most doors whatever you're using you can put markers in it's great for knowing where different parts of the song are if it's your own song you may not need them but I think if you are if you're mixing someone else's song and you're not so familiar with it it's really really handy to have markers that's certainly something I've already done on music life cryptos track which we'll be looking at next week so that's the first thing here now the next thing that I have here is you'll notice that all of the faders are on zero okay so everything is set up um on zero and then what would normally happen is the gain the gain is at the top of these channels that would also be set to zero it's not set to zero at the moment because I've already done gain staging there's a first thing I'm going to talk about I didn't want you to have to sit and watch me actually spend 30 minutes gain staging this track may not take 30 minutes so I've already done that but I am going to demonstrate what I'm doing with gain staging in real time now the point here is that I've covered gain staging a number of times on the channel before but this is a real life situation and you can ask me questions so please feel free to do so so before we go to our next commercial break we'll just deal with gain staging first now the purpose of gain staging for me is not to have a specific level but to have a healthy level and I probably myself thought a long time ago that oh there's a phase in mixing where you do gain staging like I'm doing now yeah but really the management of gain happens all the way through the process specifically it starts off at the tracking process this is where you're really setting the gain of your instruments when you set the recording level now in the past you probably set it fairly high when you're recording on tape because you wanted to make sure say the volume of the the guitar was much louder than the hiss of the tape whatever you know is causing a noise issue so back in the day you would set it nice and loud and also it works really well with a lot of analog gear to have things pumping it a little bit to get some natural nice sort of harmonic distortion and things but in the digital realm we really don't need to do that so that's the first thing to understand if you've come if you've come back to recording after several years away now all I'm going to do at this stage though is just check that the gain is okay this is what I would be doing so as long as I've recorded things at a decent level then it should be a decent level to begin with as it happens with this I it was a demo I recorded things fairly quickly there was a number of things that were not recorded at an optimal level but let's start off with let's just look at what I would now do at this stage to check that the gain is okay now it is important that you do have your faders at zero okay so unity so that you can check the levels correctly the gain levels okay now all the way I like to do this is you can use the meters on the channels but they're fairly small even you know when it's not all blurry like this but it's better in my opinion to have a plugin like this one where it's a bit bigger and there's a couple of little advantages in this plugin but what I do like about this by this way it's called Free G I think it's by who is it by let me just have a quick look there I can't remember the name I'll see it it remind me here Sonalxis however you pronounce that I've had it I've had it in one of my videos before I like this just a nice big display that's the one Mima pretty cool what I do like about it is it's just nice and clear you can't see it here but the top two meter readings here are peak levels and these ones are RMS and those are two things I'm looking at quite clearly when I am gain staging okay you reset them just if you're going to try this you'll reset them by just double clicking on those numbers and you do need to reset quite a lot when you gain staging now normally what's going to happen let's go right over to let's go to this guitar track here okay there's just the second one here I'll reset the gain there just so that we are starting from scratch so you've got this on your master channel you've got this inserted into your master channel 3G that's so you can use it for all of the instruments without having to put it on individual channels I'm then going to solo you can see I've soloed this guitar track here so we'll just have a quick listen to it now importantly I'm going to a part of the song where this guitar is kind of at its loudest point okay so let's have a little listen to this so I told you the guitar was horrible didn't I listen to that so you can see that I'm getting you know my meter reading there okay now I know that some people have asked me in the comments of some of the videos you know why do you have to have the fader up there you know remember there's a difference between gain and volume so the fader is controlling the ultimate how loud it is for the listener but the gain is the actual level of the actual signal when and especially in terms of when we're working our door it's the level that it's going to hit the plugins at okay so you can have something clipping you know because the gain is up too loud let's do that now let's make this guitar clip let's turn the fader down first though let's play this all right you can see that's clipping oh yuck yeah and even though it's clipping it's it's because the gain is up full we can still turn that down that was a bad demonstration of it I should have had another plug in there let's move on anyway don't worry about it so it's important to have the fader at unity at zero and then we'll adjust the gain to get this volume right now what was happening there when I played that guitar I'm just looking at the comments here just to see if there's some important questions what's happening here is I'm going to look at these two meter readings now I'm going to tell you with something like a guitar I am not so much interested in the peak level I'm interested in the rms okay the rms is like the average level rather than the peak level the reason being I've said this many times before it bears repeating is that many plugins are optimized for historical reasons to actually kick in that if they're emulating some analog warmth to kick that in at around about minus 18 db I'm not going to go into the reason so I've said I've talked about it before but just take that as right so I am actually going to be looking at an rms of around about minus 18 db with this guitar now this is not an exact science I don't care if it's minus 16 or minus 17 or minus 20 or whatever it can be around about minus 18 okay you don't need to fiddle around with this for hours now let's play that guitar so my you can't read it but the rms reading there is about minus 21 at the moment okay so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go over to the gain control over here in cakewalk and push it up by about 3 db or so there it is around about 3 db there you go why am I doing 3 db 21 18 3 okay let's have a listen it's actually kicking in there around about minus 17 rms that's it okay how long would that take me to do in real life like five seconds because I wouldn't be waffling on like this so there is my my gain staging done for that guitar okay now I'll do it again let's go over and do it for should be fun let's do it for the piano over here okay so the piano is over here playing in some part here's my piano playing this is going to be awful and let's have a look listen to this so you're going to make sure your track is soloed yeah I'll just make sure and go make sure that track that guitar isn't soloed yep I'll reset my plug in by clicking here on the numbers there and I'll play that piano part so you can't read it again it's around about minus 16 at the moment okay so in this case it could be deemed just a little bit too loud I could just take a couple of db off there you know what in honesty in real life I probably wouldn't touch that that would be close enough for me okay but just for the sake of just so that's how I'll go through each and every track except for drums or anything percussive or anything which is really mostly made up of a transient and that's where I focus my mind much more on um on sorry I'm trying to read the chat right focus my mind much more on the peaks here okay so let's go over to um a kick drum over here we'll actually reset that because I've already gained stage this and see why I did what I did so let's have a listen bring up our plug in again um to this kick sounds like someone hitting the bass drum with a wet fish for some reason but there you go we'll get back to the sound of that later um it is um it's it's got an rms of about minus 16 it doesn't really matter what I'm interested in here is the peak because you don't really get much of a sort of an rms in such a short sound yet it's all about where does it hit yeah so I'll be on percussive things I'll be looking at the peak level now again it doesn't really matter um I like as long as it's not clipping um I like to get it though around about minus six why because we'll see later when we do a little bit of drum mixing the um the when you put things all together they start to build up and things will be peaking when these go through to a bus so I've just generally found from experience that peaking at around about minus six is is a nice starting point I'm just seeing that's a nice idea a wet hey maybe Keonra with your new fancy studio you should make a sample library the wet fish sample library okay so anyway um so that's how I go through and and I do my gain staging now let's talk about what this means in reality a little bit um if you've taken a little bit of time to get your recording levels correct then this should be a checking exercise more than anything you'll probably just be whizzing through all of these tracks and going fine fine fine fine fine fine fine absolutely fine and here and there just doing a little bit of adjustment but you will be checking that gain at various different stages through the mix to be honest with you now let me just talk about virtual instruments a little bit I have noticed and I think it may be a ploy by uh some virtual instrument makers that they actually some virtual instruments can be recorded very hot very loud it's like they've ignored all of this I wonder if it's a way of just making it sound better like the first time you load it up and you you you you play it it actually sounds nice and loud and strong um I find that there's a number of virtual instruments where I have to you know really control the gain where they they record them very very hot and they're very loud I don't know but do make don't assume just because it's some high-class virtual instrument that you've spent hundreds of dollars on that the levels are going to be perfect out of the box when they're when they're set to unity not so in my experience so do check that just as a by the way the drums here that we're going to be dealing with and we're going to be dealing with them a lot after this break coming up um are actually are actually addictive drums drums okay which are separated onto different channels as I say Ed Thorn ended up recording some drums for me for this track which sounded amazing but those are not his drums that we're listening to at the moment so first stage was just organization and a bit of gain staging this is all done so that I can work towards a quick static mix which I don't think we're going to get too fully today but let me talk in a moment after this break about what I do next and this does involve a little bit of actual mixing 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 seven percent 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. Okay I see there's been some interesting things going on in the chat over there how exciting okay so let's move on thank you so much by the way to Kyonra and to Mimo and to Doug who are doing the moderation in the chats great that people are here looking at those things so I don't have to look at them too much because I can tell you I'm already over multitasking here so I the the the ploy or the the approach I have towards mixing the track initially used to do it as quickly as possible the reason being because I personally get fatigued very quickly and find that that I actually lose track of what's going on with the mix I lose my objective very very quickly so I like to mix as quickly as possible but it's kind of hard to mix quickly when you're managing what have I got here 33 tracks all in all so I like to break this down into what's really here because although there's 33 tracks what we've actually got is guitar I'm holding up my fingers here I know you can't see you've got guitar we've got vocals we've got bass we've got drums and we've got keys and we've got strings okay so we've really only got six main elements in in in terms of an arrangement but we've got 33 tracks so what I like to do is work towards getting it down to six things that I'm just mixing yeah getting the levels right but I'm going to need to organize further so although when it comes to it I'm going to be mixing this song starting with the vocals I'm going to create some little sub mixes first okay and the first sub mix excuse me that I'm going to create is with the drums okay so those are all in green here for those of you watching I know you can't see them read what they are individually but we'll find out together um do ask me questions by the way if you've got any questions um I thought Pete John suggested put a cue at the beginning of your your comment so that we can more easily find um now before we do that we're going to select all of the tracks so I'm just going to select one track and do control a on my keyboard I've got all of my tracks selected and whilst I'm holding control I'm just going to drag one of the faders down and all of the faders go down okay so everything is now can now cannot be heard and I am then going to select my kick drum and I'm going to double click on that fader holding control which puts it back up to you see this is going to be my sort of bass line I don't mean bass line as in do do do I mean bass line as in a basic level that we're going to work everything else around just an anchor point if you like and let's have a listen to that kick listen to earlier didn't we absolutely just answering a question there from Doug I absolutely do set up effects buses I should mention at this point I'm glad you've asked this Doug before we proceed with this little drum mix here that I have almost no effects on this whole track at the moment everything's dry I like to do effects later the only exception being you'll see some effects here in yellow these are guitar amp sims so I'm not really thinking of these as effects as such as they're recreating the sound of a guitarist if he if we recorded him or hers actual amp yeah okay so although they're plugins I'm not thinking of them effects in the usual way so I've got them on the guitars and I've got them on the bass but at the moment I have no effects in this at all but I will be setting up buses I prefer not for everything Doug but I will particularly for delay reverb and a few other things there will be some busses created later probably not in this show so going moving on I will then bring up usually a snare and I'm not overthinking anything here by the way all of this can be changed later but I'm going to get a basic mix of my drums and I'll show you let me demonstrate you how quickly I'll do that hi hats loud I'm careful with hi hats because you get a lot of hi hat in the overheads okay so I don't want to take that individual hi hat up too loud that's horrible so I'll go about there I'll bring in the overheads I like this is where some some some it comes to life now there's not a whole bunch of symbols in this which is a lot of your overheads sound is going to be in the sim is going to have symbols but there are some and then I'll quickly bring in the room this I like it when I bring in the room on these addictive drums because this is really where it starts to actually sound like a live kit up until now not really as you're getting all that room sound yeah now there's a particular channel here which is called drum buss which actually was it was a it was a bus from within addictive drums which had the kick going to it mostly you're going to hear the kick change a lot as I bring this up there you go and then finally this amp I've called it ambient but it's not quite but it's got this is a channel from addictive drums where there was a lot of mostly reverb on the snare I seem to remember okay as I say you don't need to overthink this you may be thinking no it's not quite right it doesn't matter because all of this is going to change when we bring in the other instruments anyway yeah but the purpose of doing this is because I think of the drums ultimately as not in this case seven individual instruments but as one instrument called drums and so once I've got that basic mix there which I'll say that so that's fine at the moment another quick check take that hi hat down a bit hmm okay I'm starting to get too fiddly now so I'll take that whole thing I'm going to grab all of those all of those tracks there and I in cakewalk what I do is I'm going to their output at the bottom here which currently points to the master I know it's really blurry for you guys you can't see but I am going to hold control on my keyboard I'm going to go to master and I'm going to go to an option here you'll have to trust me in fact you can't actually see this pop up I'm just noticing on the screen that's a bit strange isn't it there you go I'm an amateur I'll tell you I'm selecting at the bottom here holding down control master and I am going to in fact look this is annoying me let me just fix this quickly give me a moment give me a second let's take this away let's fix this technical hitch I think I've chosen there we go I need to choose that there we go let's bring cakewalk back up again hey nice okay let's try that again so I've selected all of the drums I'm holding control on my keyboard going to this menu for the output at the bottom ah there you go you can see that there's a menu popped up there now and I am going to select new stereo bus as the option there new stereo bus so all the outputs from these drums are now going over to let's find it over here this new stereo bus which cakewalk is kindly called bus c for me which I'm now going to rename to drums okay now if I change the color of bus c or drums there we go let me just go there I'll change it to the color of my settings are obviously wrong I'll change it to the same color as the drums let's just play them and you can see I can now control the control the overall drum volume using that fader now I may at this stage actually do some gain staging or gain checking let's call it or what have you on the bus itself okay so let's solo or let's hang on solo that we don't really need to solo it but anyway um in fact let's not solo it let's bring up that free g plug in again and see what's happening with the drums as a whole instrument yeah I'm doing something wrong here let's try that's because sorry I haven't got this going out to the master so I've got a strange setup here at the moment let's do that there we go so what's happening there is the rms is about minus 14 okay so you can see and that's I'm looking at rms now because we're looking at this a whole instrument it's a whole bunch of things in a continuous sound rather than just one okay so it's at minus 14 it's probably a little bit too hot right but when we start adding in bass and vocals and guitars things are going to start to get out of control so I'm going to bring down that let's try it okay so now it's about an rms of about minus 18 okay Danny um this I'm glad you asked this Danny because I was just about to talk about a little bit of panning so sometimes obviously when you're getting the things like this um from like addictive drums there's already already going to be some panning which has happened but in my case I kind of resettle that so I can handle the panning myself let's have a quick listen however we already do get some stereo some sense of stereo um particularly from the overhead the room and the sort of ambient okay so let's just solo those if you listen carefully whilst I have all the panning set to center yeah um then uh then that we're still getting a stereo image and that's because these were recorded in stereo on stereo tracks so there's that part of it do I mix from an audience perspective or a drummer's perspective personally I liked I preferred doing it from an audio an audience perspective okay but it only really comes into play in any kind of significant way is perhaps with tom feels and things when we're going across from left to right um but I will do a little bit of panning here and I'll do it just on the snare and the hi hat just ever so slightly and I only do it slightly and that's because yes if you're sitting at a drum kit there's quite a significant move isn't there from from the center over to the snare you might even think about it as almost a 45 degree angle over there yeah right the way over there but from an audience perspective who's you know 20 meters away it's really mostly coming from one single point there isn't that they're getting most of the stereo sound from the room the fact they've got two ears and they're in a room okay so like yeah what if it is a left-handed drummer Doug that that really but anyway I will go to I'm going to just take this snare and I'm probably just going to go a little bit over to the right from an audience perspective the snare is usually with a right-handed drummer to the right I'll get my left some right it's confused so I'm just going to do a little pan on that a little okay and that hat so ever just tiny moves that I want the kick to be right down the middle call me traditional um and you know you've got to remember though and what I'm going to be careful with with something like a snare is only going to be slight because if people are listening you know in mono things like that that could really screw up something like a snare which we want to be basically in the center now if this song doesn't have any toms in it to be honest with you the whole song is made up of just little snare fills things like that there's no toms if I had toms in there it'd be a completely different story and there's two different approaches I take I'm going to sometimes want it to be kind of realistic and you know just have a little bit of movement from left to right and tom fills but sometimes I want it to be in effect and sometimes it's really amazing to hear fills go all the way from your left to your right ear and although it doesn't sound realistic um it it's sounds great things don't always have to sound realistic how do I also suggest so I've got my drums kind of sitting there yeah cool okay now I'm going to take that drum fader over there on that bus and put it all the way down to zero okay and let's um move on to let's just quickly give me a moment let's go to bass all right I you'll notice what are the way I've organized things here um and I'll always do this my two bass tracks are in brown over here okay I absolutely you know if you're if you're a lonely rocker I reckon wide toms all the anyway it is fun isn't it it's basic anyway um now you'll notice that I've organized I've got my bass guitar two bass guitar channels here um and I've got them right next to the drums just to the left and that's because there is such a close relationship between bass guitar and a kick drum and you'll notice I've got my kick drum right to the left of my group of drums here that I like to have them next to each other in my consoles because they'll be working closely together now bass guitar I have Dan was talking about this with Pete earlier I quite often these days especially I quite often like to have my bass guitar uh just I just I I do have a little bass amp it's a great little Fender bass amp I bought but can't be bothered to get a microphone out always and I think bass guitars can sound great if it's DI only yeah let's have a listen now bass guitar in my opinion quite often needs some compression and that's largely because um you can hear my playing there is not all that even it's actually really hard if you're not a bass player like me to play it really evenly so compression would come later but I'm going to achieve the my basic mix without anything like compression now I do like to have a little bit of a bass amp sound in there as well okay um so what I have done here is I've done a send from that bass guitar over to this auxiliary channel if you're in cakewalk you could send it to a bus the reason I've used an auxiliary channel which is going to behave very very similarly to a bus is because you can have auxiliary channels over here with everything else in cakewalk all the buses go all the way over to the right and I want to I want my bass amp to be right next to it so that's the only reason I've used an auxiliary channel there and I have used Amplitube um this particular bass head which I really really like ampeg ampeg style bass head and this is the SVXVR okay let's have a listen to that so I'll just take that fader down for the original DI bass and have a listen to this I don't know about you I like that I like that bass sound so all I generally do is try and mimic a real world situation where I'd actually record a bass amp so I'll bring that bass guitar up yeah up to parity okay just on zero I'm not mixing it with the drums yet or anything like that and I will then just blend in that bass amp to taste it's very subtle I know but go along with me here I think it makes a little bit of a difference just that's a little bit of roundness to the tone which I like anyway I don't always do it I quite often just use the the actual bass guitar DI all by itself so let me take those two because I don't really want to have to you know every time I make a mixed decision I don't want to have to adjust both of those faders so I'll grab both of those I'm holding control on the keyboard selecting both of them going to that master output at the bottom again holding control on the keyboard and going to a new stereo bus it doesn't need to be stereo we can make it mono but we'll leave it stereo at the moment it's fine so that's called bus D it's been created all the way down there let's call it bass I must have fiddled with my settings a little bit because there's a setting in cakewalk where the um the bus that you've sent something to will now determine the color of the channels but I'm having to do it separately it's fine um but I'll make it a similar color yeah so I've got my bass bus over here or right on the right hand side created from those two bass signals yeah so what I've now got is two channels over here in my buses which I'm going to use to control my mix so I've got my drums here yeah and I've got my bass so if I wanted to create a mix at the moment generally that was the only two elements I'll bring up my drums set them to parity and I'll and I'll blend in my bass to taste and again we don't need to fuss about this that may be right it may be wrong we don't know until we start to bring in the other elements really how closely that um that bass is you know in terms of how well it's mixed with the whole song we don't know that at the moment but as two things together I'm actually particularly listening to the relationship between the kick and the bass not too bad a performance actually they're kind of locked in really be well together so I'll listen to the relationship between the two but again I don't fuss too much at this stage okay that's fine I'll put them both back down to zero again and ruin all that I'll go ahead and I will grab my guitars because the guitar the guitar in this particular song the acoustic guitar forms a key part of the rhythm section how are we going so far by the way um moderators I don't know what's going on there thank you so much Mimo Japan somebody's really having fun in there I don't know if we can ban that account that would be great anyway um let's go ahead and look at these acoustic guitars so acoustic guitar um in this case is made up of three tracks I'll explain it we've got a left and right channel as I said I'm not very happy with the sound of it but we're going to live with it let's just bring those the first two up to parity with each other and have a quick listen now this is recorded in stereo so I obviously intended to pan these left and right so let's just do that the first one I'll pan left the second one I'll pan right fine that's not fine but it's okay I just have one last um track in here for the guitar which is going to be grouped in with these two now it's called guitar hit in the performance of this song I play the guitar and I actually hit the body of the guitar at some stage yeah um I it's a part of the performance but what I found when I recorded it was you know sometimes I hit that too loud or you know it's not the same as when you're just playing it live so I decided to actually fake it and do the hits on the body separate to the as a separate performance that's behind the science scene it's a bit of cheating there so I actually have this weird little track in here just at this point in the intro well helps if you turn it up mic this one yeah it's just a little hit there that I put in there so let's go back yeah and that's a little bit too loud for me so I'll just bring the fader of that down and that's fine so that's why I've got those three tracks so I'm going to do the same again I'm going to do all three of those I'm going to select them holding control on the keyboard set their output to a new stereo bus which all the way around the right here I'm going to call uh GUI TA GUI TA and then I'm going to color that similar color again to my original tracks and you can see I'm starting to build something over here over in the buses I have these three tracks here drums bass guitar they form the basis of my rhythm section and I'll bring up the drums begin with I'll blend in the bass and then I'll blend in the guitar and we'll get a little mix going on and I've got something solo down here almost certainly let's just have a little listen there we go here we go so you get this a little bit more of a proof of concept thing going on here so there is that's how I build things up I'm going to quickly work through the rest okay I've got my uh pianos here we've got two pianos one's a one's a part of the performance which is I've just got the basic piano let's have a listen to that let's go to a part of the song where it's actually playing and give me a moment give me a moment should be there why isn't it there this is what happens when you do live stuff hey oh Mike oh have you ever done that helps if the fade is turned up Mike so you can actually hear it remember you've turned all the faders down earlier let's have a listen so there's a high piano there so why have I got two separate tracks why don't I have it on one and that's because I have a plan for that high piano that it's going to have loads of reverb on it later okay so that's why I've got on two separate tracks but I don't want to have to fiddle around all the time with both of those so I'll just listen to the balance between the two that's fine so I've got my piano and piano piano and piano and again I will have them both going out to one stereo bass let's go and call that piano I'm upping the speed a little bit here for you folks I hope you appreciate that piano I've spelled a pionna for some reason I'm going to go with that it sounds like kionra doesn't it that's cool that's yeah we can have an instrument called a pionna that's fine so there we have a piano now that's all good and then let's do the same with the strings or we'll have those up okay so I've got my two strings there again I will have them going out to a new stereo bass which I'll call strings strings let's change the color of it to the same as the original roughly how are we going there in the chat you've reported the bad comments thank you so much uh sam junior sam ja and there we go awesome stuff guys I'm going to work fairly quickly through to the stage I want to get through so I'm sorry if I'm not catching any questions and comments for you I'm doing my best here I'm an absolute beginner at this whole thing of having many many things going on at once so here we are what have we got so far we have a bass with drums we have bass we have guitar we have pionna which is a new instrument that I just came up with and we have strings and that forms I believe let me just double check that forms the basis of my rhythm section okay just have a listen to a part of the song the bridge here okay so that's just there we're going to do an actual mix in a moment I promise you okay but we'll just leave them where they are at the moment now the next thing is vocals this is a bit of a sort of a different thing at the moment um because often what happens if you are a vocalist and you've got you like to do a few harmonies and this and that you end up with a lot of tracks um but really it's not complicated there's two vocals in this song a female vocal and a male vocal but there's some bits and pieces added in there some bits of harmony some doubles and things like that and first of all just going to focus on the two lead vocals the two main vocals that was Susie and me and there's a track here the I've done the look I've done the female vocals in pink and the male vocals in blue what can I say shoot me um so let's go for just bringing up Susie's main vocal up actually it's very it's very quiet isn't it compared to everything else you notice that now we're going to fix the balance of the mix in a moment but I I am going to curiously you I'm actually going to send this to a bus all by itself okay um and this is only for organizational purposes okay so I'm going to send its output over to a new stereo bus which I'm going to call female lead okay it's fine could have called it all kinds of things but we'll call it female lead and I'm going to color it in that kind of weird little pinky color there why have I sent a single track to a single bus it's only so that I can control it over on the right hand side over here next to all the other little buses okay it's it's only for organizational purposes it could sometimes serve a functional purpose in terms of effects and things like that but in this case it's only for that reason and I'm going to send my male vocal my lead male vocal right over to a bus which is going to be called you've guessed it male lead okay I've got that and then let's do that in blue that's all happening over there and then finally there's a whole bunch of harmony vocals and things like that not too much so there's this part here where Susie doubled up with herself let's solo I'll bring this up you hear that okay so I've got a rough balance between them again like everything else in this I won't know where that balance is correct until until I do the mix later but I know from experience that around about there is going to work okay I'm going to pan one left and one right all the way extremely let's have a listen to that now now I've got some width happening it's panned a little bit too hard for my taste have a listen okay that'll do for me fine she's also sung some harmony let's go over here and let's bring that up solo those just there okay that's fine for now what I'm going to do now is grab all of those vocals anything that I regard as a backing vocal and I'm going to send them through to a bus which is going to stereo bus there oops try again Mike let's just send them all through to that which is that one okay and that is going to be called female backing and again we'll color that in pink up there okay and guess what I'm going to do the same for the male backing parts let me just quickly run through them now I've got my lead vocal part here which was around about here well no one likes to sound their own voice today but there's that one now I also did I believe some doubles let me just find that one on pan left and right so these are double vocals which are just here and there in the song just to kind of give a little bit of emphasis to build the sound up a little bit we shouldn't be too aware of them in the final mix but there they are and I think finally oh I've got a harmony vocal in there I can't remember doing that oh this should be interesting let's have a listen that's your fact that was happening with Sue's I'll just quickly put these back on that's fine okay interesting and then finally towards the end I had these weird little outro vocals which I'll just solo all of those and bring them up okay so very very quick sort of organization of tracks there sorry to be whizzing through so quickly not explaining things you can see what I'm doing I'm just getting up to a basic kind of level where I think it might be okay not overthinking things not trying to refine anything here because I'm just creating groups of things so I'm going to grab all of those vocals I just did there those male vocals which are not the main vocals excuse me and I'm going to put them all through to a bus stereo bus there right at the end we'll color it blue and we'll call it we'll call it male backing superb how are we doing so far there we go just reading your comments here nice gotcha yep yep okay yeah more bassy tone yeah I agree all right moving on let's just have a I just need a moment here folks so let's just go to a quick word from our sponsor how many words from our sponsor have we had in this so far I'm not really sure I've lost track anyway if you do follow the link up in up above me or follow the link in the description this is what's going to happen 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 seven percent 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 title iHeart Radio Deezer and more okay thank you so much DistroKid for that so I've been working fairly quickly towards the end in real life again much more quickly this you should notice at the moment there's a little bit of a theme for this I keep saying don't worry about it I keep saying you know don't don't fuss too much over it's very very important because I know at this stage you go oh is that snare loud enough don't worry about that at the moment just get a rough sound what we're aiming for here is an ease to be able to get a stereo sorry a static mix going fairly easily and you can see now if we go over to the buses over here um on in cakewalk that we near have one two oops sorry one one two three four five six seven eight nine uh buses okay and that's how we're going to create our static mixes just with those faders now most importantly what I would normally do at this point um before I go to this stage is not do the static mix now I'll go away I would have a break I would uh have in fact if you could do one or two days of break in between and just leave this at this point you go right I've organized everything I'm ready to do my static mix then that would be best okay but I'm going to show you I'm going to do a static mix right now on with what I've got here um and it should show you how I'm thinking again I won't be overthinking things I'm just looking for an overall balance let me pull um every one of the faders down okay so let's grab them all and pull them all down okay so we've got no sound good I'm working on first of all this is a very important thing I'm going to be working on what is kind of a pretty loud part of the song now in this in the case of this song it's not really the chorus this has got one of those weird choruses which you know is a little bit more subdued than the bridge to it so the bridge to the chorus is actually the kind of loudest part of the song so I'm going to be working with the bridge now this is where a lot of people are very different to me I've mentioned this several times on the show now I see where here's where we see it in action because this is where most people start they go let's do the drums and bass they do that quickly do you know what I've just realized I didn't send those strings through why am I hearing strings one moment oh yeah one of those strings has gone to the wrong place let me just fix that do do do this is live there we go try again they'll get basic thing going like that a lot of people will then bring in the vocals I don't know why I haven't got my vocals there I've done something wrong again folks let me just double check do you know why because there was no female vocals at that point let's go to another bridge the first bridge okay so that's where a lot of people work and I don't like to work like that okay they bring up everything else they get a mix going there and then they bring up those vocals um it's fine if you want to work like that I'll show you how I work though I start off with those lead vocals I put them at unity so I'll put that up to zero on those lead vocals I don't normally do backing vocals and things like that I just get my bass line is my vocal in other words that's that's what I'm working everything else around I like it because that's kind of the focus of the song and that's what I want to make sure is just always in the pocket and where it wants to be so it's just a perspective thing yeah it's you can work it the other way around let me bring up those drums and bass and guitar with that quickly and piano fine and I'll bring in some strings what I find is for whatever reason and by the way how's the overall violin and music I've just turned my headphone mix up because I was finding that I couldn't quite hear what was going on there let me just try and if it's okay with you guys I will just turn up the music a little bit here using some controls okay hopefully that'll be working okay thank you Kyonra that was I was thinking myself there so because it's because I'm because I work in this way yeah where I'm bringing the vocals up now things are fairly quiet usually okay so you'd normally need you'd find normally you're turning up master volumes and things for this to work really really well let me just quickly go into my mixer here on second guys so I'm just getting that right so I can hear it properly yes so there we go hopefully that you'll be you're hearing that bit so this is where I work okay now I'm not going to pretend this is a brilliant mix but it gets me in the ballpark yeah let's bring up some of those backing vocals for the Fimo vocal there have a listen again I'm just listening to some different elements here for example this time I'm going to be listening to the strings it's kind of working okay for me at the moment but as I say this is why it would be so important to take a break okay to take a couple of days because I can already feel I'm losing perspective you guys are probably all losing perspective as well because you've been listening to this with me and that's why it's not a good idea to do this stage right now but it gives you a rough idea of how I work so there's obviously other elements if I go to the second bridge this is where I am taking the lead vocal and again I'll bring up some of the backing vocals okay so it gives me what I call a static mix right just very working very very quickly not mucking around there think of this is a live gig yeah imagine the band are on stage you're the live sound engineer you don't have 24 hours to sit there and fiddle and get things right the gig's about to start and you're just going to go right that's right that's right that's right what do you think ask a couple of other people what do you think yeah that's right you're just getting in the ballpark from here on we do an awful lot of things in terms of refining it but this is our static mix now do remember that this is only mixing or sounding okay in this part of the song if we were to go right back to the beginning of the song let's go to the part in fact I didn't cover the I just remembered I did miss an instrument in there because at the beginning of the song we've got that b3 organ remember when you need to where's that let's bring that up enough in actual fact I just realized I missed a whole bunch of electric guitars in there as well sorry Doug and people that play electric guitar I forgot they were a part of this arrangement but you get the idea that I would then with the b3 organ for example that would go through a bus over here all by itself the guitars the electric guitars would probably all potentially all be on one bus which I would then just bring up okay I think we've sort of run out of time today because this has been going this show has been going for an hour and a half already I can see some people are going off to go to bed etc thank you so much for being with me it's been a hoot I hope it's been helpful do let me know if you have found it helpful and then we'll make some of this or at least in shorter sections in this a part of the show now as I say next week we'll be sort of doing everything that I've done to this song so far I'll be doing that to music life cryptos song great song by the way I've just been listening to different elements of it music life crypto yesterday and the day before you've really got a nice voice actually I'm really enjoying listening to your vocals soloed and yeah we'll be taking it from this kind of stage with music life cryptos song and we'll be moving further along still so my principles here a little bit different to other people's is about organization it's about grouping things into small chunks which you can handle so that when you're mixing you can just go bang bang bang and create a static mix as quickly as possible don't forget as well to check out the show that I was talking about before which was Pete John stalking to Dan the lonely rocker watch the replay of that that was on just before my show today if you were not in there I know some of you were in the live chat really enjoyed that just an interesting perspective on creating things and yeah I will see you all next week on fix my mix number 25 wow I like where this is going I've got to say I and I'm enjoying this thoroughly so I hope you guys are enjoying it too and I will see you next week