Lessons

Lesson Info

Mixing Guitars

Yeah have you played one more time? I'm gonna throw this on anything on a new play list on dh what playlists are is it's kind of like it's another take behind what you're already seeing so what I can do is I can record over this and then go to the previous playlist and still have what what has already been recorded without losing that information so let me give you eight clicks than urine and then what I'm doing here is I'm just pulling this back and ending that punch right on the downbeat and doing a little faith there um because actually I'm just kind of demonstrate what it sounds like when you do it mid mid region it sounds like this right? Right of the stronger the once again it's kind of all about like trying teo I guess I should've titled this course like how to cheat at audio because that's what a lot of these kind of tricks are you know you're trying to you're trying to give the impression that you or there's the goal I think is to to fool the listener into thinking that you ha...

d a big budget when in reality you did it in your garage you know, or your bedroom um uh ok, yes, I think that's cool that now let's double the uh now it's double that there should we double the rhythm or your original part right? Yeah look, I'm playing all the guitars in this band right now she is not the case I put it reality for the least guitar anyone? Um oh, you know, which brings me to another point um it is totally not uncommon to have I'm not saying this is the case in your guy's band but it is totally not uncommon toe have bands and it's like I think I think the biggest thing you know, one of the one of the big do's and don'ts I think when you're entering kind of like the studio situation is toe really just kind of check your ego at the door and it's like dude, if the rhythm guitar player plays the lead better than you do like let him play it, you know, it doesn't matter that like dude on the lead guitar player, I have to play that part that's my part, you know, and it's like same thing it's like, if there's like a cool base like that you know you came up with but you can't quite play it well, but for whatever reason, like the drummer or guitar player can play it very well it's like dude, play it you know, because in the end we're all trying to make the best reporting possible and it's not necessarily about mean it's like you know, do you really care that like, you know, someone's going to listen to that part and they're going to say, man, that bass players sucks, you know? And then it's like well, yeah, but that's me playing it's like you have it in the end you want people to say, you know, like that part's brad, you know, like and who cares if the guitar player played it? You know, it's like it's a red part, you wrote it, you know? Yeah, totally any questions? While I'm kind of setting this up has a question about the same he says the same question I had before considering the base has effects pedals to said the I signal is that drier wet the deal so that you're taking okay? So I in this situation since I'm going very minimal, I am taking the dry signal because I'm using it kind of as I'm trying to demonstrate like a safety net so and by safety net, I mean, if your performance is air cool well and I'll kind of discuss two reasons why you would want a clean die on dh why you would want a wet t I will call it wet or affected die so clean dea is good for, uh, like editing, so if you if you're looking for an extremely tight performance um I don't want to say process but like if you're if you're really looking for that just like completely locked in sound of like, you know, kicks near toms and base that type of sound um then I think it's important to have abase clean d ay because um if you look at um actually you know what when we track this I had it passion wrong so I have a wet d I um and I probably should have paid more attention to that so yeah andi actually what I want to show you is something more than you can see actually so if you look here the basically I um you can actually see the transience of like where the attacks are going through here so say for this section you know, so if you were to edit that and line those up with um, the kick drums you know, you would have a very clear idea of where you wanted to kind of cut and have your transients and and where tow line them up with your kick as well as if you're not on a grid you're going to wanna you know, line your bass guitar with just the kick drum and you won't have that grid to kind of like rely on for quant ization um but what happens is when you have your affected base now over this chorus you have no way of really knowing where you're strumming is over this whole section of the guitar of this song so pretty much you know I mean I could probably still edit this but that's with tons of years of experience doing it so this whole section here all of these transitions have been completely flattened out by the distortion so ill play with that sounds like versus this the reason why I would prefer to have a clean d I um I can probably demonstrate on these guitars because here is our guitar die of course the sounds absolutely horrible and you never actually put this in the mix but you can see how these you can see and you have kind of like a transient toe edit if you needed to exactly where to put these, uh, these drumming notes. So for instance, on on the top tracks here, which is like two fifty seven and the one seventy track, you can't really see where you have no kind of visual cue of where to if these were totally out of time and it was just something that bugged you and you had to fix them, you don't really have any kind of visual cues even even zooming and you barely have them, you know, like you would kind of cut there there there may be but it's so much easier when you just have to die and you can kind of group the tracks together and then you have this die you could placing that a point there there you know? So each each strum could be moved and quant you know or put wherever you want and then once you I could probably go into this a little bit as soon as we're done tracking but once you're done kind of moving these guitar parts to where you think they feel tight with the drums then you can actually take that edited d I guitar and pump that back out through the amp and you it's you'll hear the editing a lot less then if you were to actually just cut and edit the uh oh the mic the miked up amp a cz well as if you start using things like elastic audio with multiple mikes on guitars then you get that weird kind of thing that can happen and you start hearing all these weird artifacts and sometimes if you try to do it by hand you know I've done some you know, early metal core type or hardcore lance and I had to actually go through before they had elastic audio I had to go through and kind of, you know, almost edit they wanted things to be super tight side to go through and do it like this at it each individual hit and then dragged things over and it just takes forever um but in the end then you have this really tight kind of lock of say, like now he was just a d I and the guitar and I'm gonna do cross fades on here so you uh so you don't hear all the quicks but then you ending up with, you know, so you end up with this kind of really tight locked locked in kind of sound, but in my opinion, especially for this music, I think that would kind of be inappropriate and sometimes you'll find that, you know, being a little bit loose actually makes things sound bigger um and another something that I learned from the picked up from that michael buying horn was if you look at like, the timing of where everything lands and this is something that we're not really going to touch on too much today because it uh because it has to do a tracking vocals, but if you look at so let me just kind of zoom in here so we can kind of see everything um and I'm going to show this here, so if you look and get a guitar track in here also someone really guitar on top and then throw this kick track up here in between so both of you guys have kind of a tendency to kind of play on top of the drums and that may not your natural tendency it could just be because you're here and you're uncomfortable situation and it's like ok, I'm a little you know on it right now so but if you look at this you're a little bit ahead like this guitar track is a little bit ahead of the kick um now if it sounds fine to your ears leave it I don't I think that's another thing toe really pay attention to like use your ears don't use your eyes so much because it's really easy to get, you know, sucked into the screen and start just being like, well, look no no it's in time because I can see it you know? Well, I don't care because you don't look at records you listen to them so a good, good kind of rule of thumb is like if it sounds good, keep it even though I grant I know you said we have your greeting the crap out of the drums but that's just to illustrate something else, so if this sounds good, leave it and what you're also doing is so let's just say, for whatever reason that didn't sound good and we wanted to tighten it up just a little bit if you're leaving it around here let's say you still kind of have this miss hammond milliseconds this's from here to here let's say, so you've got if you're vocal land I say you have a vocal that wants to land on the downbeat of a song like in my opinion now you have almost a and you could look at the mill of seconds right here so you can't you almost have like a thirty millisecond landing pad of where your vocal can land and it's still going to sound fine whereas if you were to tighten this up so much toe where it's exactly on here and your base just lands exactly on the kick trump now you have a landing pad of like eight milliseconds you know and that's what causes you to you and that's kind of like that that pickle you run into sometimes where once you start editing things you kind of have to edit everything otherwise the things that you don't edit sound super out um so anyways this is I guess this is just kind of something to kind of keep in mind that you know, like if something feels right keep it and it'll also kind of help you in the end because sometimes a loose recording will help other aspects like feel like more natural and more tight you know and sometimes as you tighten certain things up then you know it makes other things sound worse okay, so let me get let me just blow through one more or did we just do you know we have to do one more right now so we're doing your rhythm guitar track now right? Okay um okay so here we go should I bring you in? I bring you into the top right? Yeah, and I kind of go over that a little bit later too about how that helps can you just give me a little bit? All right, wait next section four clicks so the process of ramping guitars I think I talked a little bit about it yesterday but ultimately would what that would be is like I said that part of the reason why I like taking a clean die and if I'm working at my spot and I have a clean d I plus die after the effects um the clean die is a really good um safety net for in case you capture this great performance but you just didn't you know say like you you were just ripping so hard that like you slipped and like you knocked your delay pedal like by feedback thing like a little hot or like you're you're tapping it out and for whatever reason like your foot just barely hit it a little late and now your tap temples were just a little bit off but your performance you played it great so it's great to be ableto take that performance, run it back through the amp another cool thing to do is sew like for instance, I'm like a guitar part sometimes it's really cool to take a plug in delay? Um, I'm just going to use this delay and you can actually create, so granted, this is going to be on a d I guitar right now, so it's going to sound absolutely horrible, but the point is, is that when you take this d I that's affected with, uh, like a perfectly, uh, tempo mashed delay now you're going to be getting your delays perfectly in the tempo because even when you tap things out, I feel like sometimes it still gets a little bit off because it's, just so hard for your foot to hit that thing just perfectly so for instance, let me get yes, then go back, and as you were pumping this back through your amp, you would be hearing the effects as if you were playing it live but it's pretty cool too, because if you're just tracking guitar yourself, you can play these things and take the d I then pump this. D I back through your amp and maybe you thought that, like when you originally performed your take, maybe you're you're wet to dry mix was not quite as wet or not quite as dries you find as your once you have all these other parts in the song now, now maybe it's this is just too wet. It's not fitting in the mix. Well, you can take your you're kind of like plug in delay or your real delay, if you want, and you can mess with that mix and get it perfect, so that as it's coming back in your session, it's exactly the blood. You want that's. Another good reason of taking a clean d I, um, and does that help grapple?