Lessons

Lesson Info

Critique Session: Owl Parliament Part 2

Okay a marine I just added a little bit of reverb to it but unfortunately can't hear hear to me dry tam marine is like the worst because you just like you get it and it's like it's always just right in your ear and it never sounds good you know you always get like like this clanky sound that happens like yeah just like that thud that happens is just it's always just like haas what's going on like it's weird because it steps over the snare so I normally kind of herb it out and put it in the back a little bit and try to give a little mordecai so you can hear it kind of after the snare happens versus competing with the snare because you hear the rattle hang out in your ears tell you that it's that it's tam marine but you're not like you know you know I mean it's like it's not like you don't like picture will farrell like making the song with like the impact of the tangerine you know it's like it's just ok the fact that there's a tampering there is enough you know um okay, base let's see h...

ere so here's what the base wass it was pretty cool um I'm not sure if that's a d I or an amp um it's like very it was hard for me to tell I did throws sands lamp on it to kind of like reshape it a little bit, just adding a little bit of like the love they called buzz but it's kind of like the low end gain I guess I kind of like saturates it up a little bit. Um I also find with bass guitar that I have to add in a lot more topping then I would think is necessary you know, a lot of the times you like all here bass guitar and you might think on manus thing sounds killer is so huge like it's, like rumbling my whole house and it's like, ok, that's cool but then you put it in the mix and then there's no room for that bottom and so you have to turn it down and then because there's no mid ranger top and you can hear it on any other stereo that doesn't have tons of subs um so there was that one. Um see your guitars the guitars were pretty cool. I didn't really do anything to the guitars I added a little bit of reverb to a bus and that was three this is this is without me adding any reverb, so this is like purely their effects in what they tracked with so here is both the guitars together uh the only thing I probably would have done differently if I was doing this I would have made sure that like those those slaps and like the delays were like well, just a little bit mohr in time with the tempo of what they were playing sometimes as he's playing those parts like I feel like the rhythm of them gets a little just a little clunky because of the delay time and that's something to pay attention to if you have, uh, there's a plug in an outfit called eco boy and within the delay parameters there it has a knob that kind of is like either rushing or dragging and it's a pretty interesting thing to play with because what it does is it speeds up or slows down like your delay time, so if you're playing like quarter notes you know and you delay it at an eighth note so sometimes if you if you if you put it to kind of like a dragging great instead of it going straight at, you know dun dun dun dun dun it'll go done, done, done and done, I've done, you know, and you keep slowing it down so it'll, like it'll like slow down the delay to almost like the delays are dragging a little bit um and it's interesting to play around with that feel a little bit um because you can totally tell like, oh man, this just feels weird and then sometimes it like makes the track feel faster, slower cool things try but like, this was one of those things where the slightly off delay time kind of made the guitar a little bit harder for me to mix I feel like if it was a little bit more locked in, I could have brought it up a little bit more admit it, sit a little more without so much reverb on it. I kind of soaked these in river because one I just thought it was kind of cool in a vibe be sounding and then too, because it, uh it just kind of like hid some of the those like delay trails on dh then the vocals soothe locals here is the vote that dry inside every indian mine under pressure taking time there's a girl in every one horse town I believe she's more than sister's hand meter own hold on so I have this was a great vocal um it's it's pretty compressed, but I don't necessarily look at that thing. I don't look at that as a bad thing, um, because I didn't really have to do much to it um I did a little bit of d s ng and then a limiter, which you can't see on here I had a little bit of top in or a little bit of like upper mids and mid range and then did some compression on there there's a diamond inside every indian mind under pressure taking time compression of the relatively slow attack so I'm kind of trying to get some of like that like excitement out of it to kind of bring it forward a little bit um on dh then I had a slapped away on their, um was gonna be I love the echo boy stuff for that um to me the slap on on music like this just totally ah buddy mine names jeremy griffith he mixes aton of music like this and were always kind of like swapping mixes back and forth and that's not a good thing to if you're getting into kind of like more like the mixing side of things it's really important to have some other friends that you trust their ears and you can send things back and forth because I've noticed a lot of the times when when you're mixing something it's it's totally possible to get so deep into it that you've been you know and especially when you're trying to work with tracks that air like subpar or you didn't track him frankly and you've spent all day trying to make this kick drum like like sound like an actual kick drum because it wasn't recorded very well and then you're like cool I think I got this mix happening and then you play for your friend and like dude what is going on with that vocal you know you're like well to me it sounds fine but check out the kick drum you know it's like so it's good to have someone that you trust you know run run run by and you guys can learn a lot from each other but anyways friend jeremy he uses this kind of echo boy slap a lot and I kind of totally ripped it off from him and I think it sounds really cool um and background vocals were good I mean like I kind of just left them as is um I did some d s ng on him because it's gone and that's kind of a cool trick with background vocals too and I did do a lot of editing to these background vocals because they were pretty pretty wild or ah what's what's a good war they're pretty expressive how about that um and so I did a lot of tightening things up and you know just I was kind of playing a little bit here for you just to see how it tightened them up and they're pretty choppy because I didn't really feel like going and and fixing and making them perfect and doing cross fades and everything so I just kind of like just did a total butcher job on him I totally hear all those bad edits in there, but I didn't really care for the purpose of this and uh and they do sound pretty chopped but in the context of the song, you're not really going to hear that I mean even just putting in the main vocal, which is more of the focus you'll see how like some of those elsewhere in here I chopped it and then kind of extended it a little bit like you can't really visible every never there's a chamber is every man get the idea so in background vocals sometimes it's really easy to, uh, get sucked in and spend all day like editing your background vocals just perfect um but in the end, I mean and you can hear how off these background vocals are, but I think they sound cool, you know? And I think especially for this type of band toe have super tune backstreet boys vocals is just it would sound ridiculous I think, um it would make me, like, not want to listen to the song I think these airwaves expressive uh, but in a good way um and then there was some other backer and locals here, which I kind of just to the same treatment taking you're all the pitch issues, but it's doesn't bother me at all for this stuff um and and then I'll kind of play a little bit of how it ended up turning out in the kind of quick wait she's more sisters just so that's kind of how it all fits together. Any, uh, questions on that one? Would you use do you, e q those higher and just saturated with reverb er to get them to sit where they're sitting so I killed some high end on those um and like I said, it's not there really is no right, you know, everyone you like and I think hopefully, you know, by and by no means I want you have to stop asking questions because I feel like every time you ask this question, it should reaffirm that like, oh, yeah, I do just have to listen so it really is important, you know, like, a lot of the times yet you might think, oh, yeah, cool these are high vocals I'm gonna kind of accentuate the top in nam but the other thing that is interesting about top end is topping his presence. So you know you're here here's like the top end as being close to you that's. Why I like, you know, when you hear like, presence on drums, you add like a top in on drums, they come forward you know the same thing like especially kick drum, you had top and click to it it's like all of a sudden that kick drum lose the front same thing with voice guitars, everything else president's kind of brings things to the front, so if you want your background vocals to sit farther back, you want to remove some of that presence as well as the s is with kind of ah, very expressive background vocals such as these, you know, and you're the kid voices are very expressive and like they will definitely kind of benefit fit from if you want to kind of, like, put them back or if you don't feel like editing like crazy, then you khun kind of kill some of that top end or you can leave the top end and d s a lot, which is what I did because when you hear those s has come out that's something that it's really distracting for me especially you have wide vocals because you have your lead vocal that because your essence and tease there kind of gives you like that, that definition of, like, the speech, you know, and those are kind of like exciting things when you hear somebody talking with those and, like, really compressed upfront vocal and then when you have, like, when your ears focused on that frequency for the excitement then you have these kind of like other s is that air happening like around the same time but they're kind of distracting because there yeah there it's almost like peripheral peripheral vision hearing you know like you're you're hearing these things attacking you from the side and it's like you like what is that I don't I want to focus on that like stop bothering me you know please that's how my brain sees it here I want to keep focused on like what's the main driving thing so that's kind of one way that I am able to do it um and um I also like compressing background vocals a lot to the point where they almost drowned over compressed which is another reason why I have to kill some of the top and and the d s ng after the fact because when you start compressing things it brings up all those s is and the breaths and all that um but the cool thing about clip gain I'm not sure if I used it on here or not yeah I did so clip game is pretty cool because it lets you kind of manipulate the way form in a way that you wouldn't really be able to do any other way so it it lets you manipulate the way form before it hits your compressor so for instance with here's where these are now and I play them for you like compressed and we're paying attention of this little piece right here where it says minus seven point eight so I brought that down seventy b from where it was recorded up and it's I believe it's here it's probably like the breath or an s or a it or something like that all right so as you're hearing and I brought all these down because it was they were stacked so don't play with the main vocal see you kind of get an idea where it is because that you want that main vocal toe have this you know that's what you want to hear so if I bring these back up to where it wass before I did the clip gain on him you know so I mean that's just one area where clip gain is just great for doing little fixes like that and even when you just solo them by themselves you can hear the difference it's kind of ducked there versus more president it is so that's something that you can do to and you can really go book wild with that like doing all of your s is aunties and it it lets you kind of because when you compress you know compression is similar like the saturation with the mike priest to where you know you're bringing down the transients or that the loud parts but you're in turn you're bringing up the quiet parts so when you do that you have to be careful because you're now you're bringing up your bringing up the exciting things like breaths you know and then those little kind of like at the end of a solvent making bringing that stuff up which is like the human field which to me is so exciting but then at the same time you're bringing up all like that kind of crap where it's like you know if they're singing and they have gum and their mouth you hear all of I guess all that crap you know you have to go through and edit it all out you know or in between like as their singing getting ready to sing and it's like a little they're finding their note in their head you know you know like they have that it's totally brings it all up you know or if they're like it's pretty funny like if you solo vocal takes like when people are singing and you like here like the weird noises they making others like you it's pretty hilarious but yeah you bring all that stuff up which means that you have to kind of clean it up so with with like all colors like production tricks there comes a lot more work that goes into making those sound right to you so any questions on that type of stuff now and clicking clip dan is kind of cool to use it on drums especially to like I did a record one time where I had to go through and actually I before they had clipped game they just had a plug and called gain or normalising and I had to actually go through and in between every snare transient I had to go through and cut and, like gained down all of the high hat hits and it was a big, big nightmare but it was like I was determined not to sample the snare so I was like, well that's just what I got to do so in that theory or in that kind of mindset I think that probably wraps it up for today, right? You know, just kind of we got a couple quick questions from the internet to use para look impression on guitar bass drums so I don't use parallel compression on, um on guitars or base but I love uh, compression parallel compression on uh, drums andi all kind of all just opened one up real quick to show you some peril compression um so here is this is bam moose blood that I said that it had a record come out um here is their drum bus. Um here is their drug bust was going to say that sounds pretty smashed, so here is their drum bus that I printed um this particular bus had no compression on it just a little bit of well no weak you and then it looks like for one section of the song I automated kind of cem some low in arson behind out of it so this is just the drums here this is like what might drum sound like without the parallel compression blended in is the parallel compression that I have uh, so this is going to be like an ssl bus compression type of planets, its hardware piece so I can't really bring here and then I have a little bit of pole tech um the p one that was probably adding in a little bit of top end we're taking some out depending on what it needed, but here is my, um, super smashed parallel bus that I would blend in underneath what kind of play it and oh, you know, like I said before, like a little less so a button shows that I'm adding it in so I'll start with just the regular bus and I'll add in the parallel and I'm kind of here what it does kind of yeah, yeah and a lot of that too is like shaping the way form and for that particular one, I was trying to add length to it, which is why I kind of smashed it more than more than usual for that because I was wanting to get that kind of off out of out of the drum, because this particular part of the song that's just kind of like this is very intro of the song. So it's, just I just know it was kind of like it is not the final mix, but it's, one of them that's, kind of why I wanted that length. Yeah.