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Lesson Info

Editing & Mixing

there's a little part of me That's O C. D. I think you kind of need that if you're an engineer or or a really good musician, maybe, um, and I just like cleaning things up in the digital world. So, uh so I think that's why and it makes a huge difference. Um, this is again small stuff, but it makes an enormous difference, and you're gonna hear you're gonna hear it firsthand. And I'm excited for you guys to to see what happens. And this gives me a chance to show everyone who may be in a band recording their own stuff, sending me something to re AMP or whatever. It be great if everyone knew how to do this properly if you run a studio or whatever. So, um, here's my play. A little song that I recorded on this one by apogee and the drums are easy. Drummer Metal Machine brought that up earlier. Here it is. I just play the whole thing for you. Unedited, Raw. All right, so there you go. That's what your guitar tracks should sound like when you have your guitarist play through it cleanly without ...

having any crazy mess ups so one of the things that I already took the liberty of doing that I'm not really showing. But you can see here on the screen I had, I mela dined some of these notes, and that's the first step. This is very important, uh, the order that you edit in It's super important. First thing you do record as much as you can. Usually, I'll record a section. Whenever I did this, you hear the two main sections. What I did was I recorded the first section, stopped, doubled it and then moved on to the next section and doubled that, um, sometimes want to get tourists is playing, though. Play the riff one way and you play through the whole song. Then they go back and they kind of have different techniques or their palm muting isn't exactly the same. The best thing that I've learned how to do learn what to do is immediately double it right afterwards so you could have a really good stereo image without having to over at it. And that's probably one problem that a lot of people have is, uh, the guitarist will do different weird versions of the riff and then they have to compensate by doing weird editing stuff. But anyway, so that's a way a good way to avoid that now. When I ran this through melody line, I meld Ein mainly these, like the open single string, anything that is a single note. Monta Phonic is another word for that, because whenever I play, I play very hard in the end of going sharp. Okay? Another very important thing that I don't really have a lot of time to get into is knowing about music theory and understanding different rhythms. Now, whenever I hear this riff, I immediately know that we have eight notes, 16th notes and eighth note triplets because of the temple that were at, um, whenever you're quanta izing something, you have all those options and you have to know when to use when to use what? So, for instance, if you Kwan ties 16th notes with an eighth note triplet, it's gonna make it wacky and vice versa. All right, so pitch correction with milled Ein auto tune works pretty well, too, but I try to keep that to a minimum tuning at all, like if you could tune it properly and play it properly when it's going in. That's going to sound better than melody or auto tune. But both of those work pretty well if you just use them a little bit. Okay, so elastic audio is what it's called in pro tools. Flex logic. There flex It is what it's called in logic, um, is a way to stretch. It's like time stretching of the audio so you can manipulate it however you want to an extent, Um, I've heard a lot of people use be detective for correcting guitars. But instead of taking the tone instead of taking the guitar note and stretching it out, it like, doubles it and you might get strange artifact ing and you'll get that weird artifact ng. If you stretch it out too much the same, Same thing will still happen. But, um, where is that Libs? Let's turn on, let's turn this on. Okay, so the mode that we're gonna be editing in is polyphonic. Now I just like to take it a section at a time. One thing that happens with editing and pro tools whenever you're quanta izing with elastic audio is it will move the regions that are behind it, Which is you don't need that. That would throw you off. So what I like to do is I like to just edit as a section by section like this. Okay, So what do we got here? Well, we have our eighth notes and 16th notes. So we have our event operations open. We have it on the Qantas eyes menu thing. Get the or, uh, for the most part, if your guitar tracks are very clean, it will. It will get the transience pretty well. So let's actually turn off randomize, which I'll get to in a second. Oh, here we go. Sorry. All right, so quantities to grid 16th notes. That's the fastest we've got going. All right, so I'm seeing something strange here. It's just here. This sounds like Okay, so if you have any headphones, by the way right now, this is a great time to put them on, because this is gonna be what I'm talking about with the mono sound versus stereo. So what I just did was, in my opinion, over edit this. I I edited perfectly to the grid. So if everybody put your headphones on, if you have headphones that this. This is, uh, it being over edited. So listen to the quick chugs Let me just do the guitar now a way around that and keep it a little human sounding as we turn on randomize which which moves the transient in front and behind the beat by a certain amount. So and then this is with the randomized on do, uh, a little more extreme here. So if you're if you're worried, headphones you will be able to hear that the difference pretty well. So this is without it. This is with it. So in headphones, that's really when you're gonna be hearing the difference. So that part's pretty cool. All right, we move on to the next section after you have all this stuff memorized, you can go through this quickly at your own pace. Whatever you got. Um, what is here? Okay, so with this part, it starts out with a quick little triplet, and it's actually kind of hard to hear because they're not lined up very well. That's where editing comes in. So what's just it might work differently. And other programs if you use flex and logic or, uh, whatever it's called in another program. But what do you know? What is it called in the pretty sauce this time? Stretch? OK, time stretch, flex, elastic, audio, Whatever you Whatever it's called. It might work differently. So let's turn on the triplet. Think these air 16th note triplets. Let's turn that off so you can hear that a lot better. Let's let's randomize that. Not a lot of difference, but this is really fast. So I don't like it to be really randomized because then it it just kind of sound sloppy again. Okay, so we go to the rest, which is Onley 16th notes. We turn that off and I like to switch between Ah, what I just did and how it waas. And you can see some of these over here are moving a lot, which is an indication that it's moved in the wrong way. So in pro tools, what I like to do is just cut that off for now because that's the only thing that was messed up. I will just have all that. But it did there. Cool. All right, so what do we got here? This is all 16th Notes. If you're using pro tools, you would change the view to analysis on whatever track you're having trouble with. And that is only the top track. Actually, warp, I'm sorry. Put on warp because all the points look correct. No, I lied. That one shouldn't be there. Then you can Kwan ties them and then move him around. Otherwise, elastic audio was kind of temperamental. You go after you basically get him in the right spot right now. There. Some of them are perfect because I moved him right into the grid. But I liked to randomize everything. So it's all a little bit off, which is pleasing to me. They're too main places that people put noise gates and that's before the guitar signal and after the guitar has been put through distortion. So either on the d I or on the distortion. The worst place for, in my opinion, for a professional recording is to ever well, one. Really. You use a d I ah, lot or put it on the their use a gate a lot or put it before the distortion because, like I was saying before, you got these little guys who are your attack? See, it's something there. It's very small, but it's there, and without it, it just sounds like it's cutting in. You can hear both sounds if you're a few, pick up on that stuff. So every time there's a break and there's a phrase a new a new guitar phrase you want to hear that picks out. Okay, I'm just getting rid of some of the edits just so I can use strips. Silence Easier, which is built into pro tools. It's like a noise gate, but it edits instead for you, which I think is awesome. Save, make sure you save all the time. We'll turn off Alaska audio. Hopefully, there are no errors. We're committing the tracks right now, so the tracks air rendering in place, elastic audio or flex and logic will time stretch your audio in real time. So now what I'm doing is I'm turning it off, and it's rendering all the changes I made. There we go. It also uses CP uh, a lot of CPU. So if you're on a laptop or something like that, you'll want to turn it off if you can. Okay, so under edit and pro tools, it's strip silence, and this is going to add it. The guitars for you. I'm just gonna do one track. I usually just try to do one track at a time because sometimes the guitars are off beat from each other and and I like that. So I want I want to keep it sounding a little natural. So these were some settings that anyone can use on strip silence, actually, just going to focus on the first part. Okay, So see here the white box is to the to the right. Here is what's going to stay to the left is what's gonna disappear. So I'm zooming in a lot and I see that some of the guitar is being cut off. Actually, so has this cool feature. Or you could expand the very beginning of it. So all these should be in in the boxes. There's another one. See? Cool, Cool. Okay. And then the other thing is the end. Do we want that to sustain? There's a little tale that we do. We want a little bit, not too much, so that might be a good setting to have it all. So let's keep it on this. Strip it. It's semi colon to go to the next track below and pro tools speaking. Which Andrew Cory Brunner mond in the chat room, says he's dying watching you not use all those great Mac Pro tools shortcuts. Yeah, I am. I usually use usually have a numeric keypad over here on the right. Has a lot of the shortcuts in it and usually on a PC. So Okay, cool. What does this sound like? Pretty cool. I want a dead stop there at the end, so we'll edit that by hand. Just deleted that. Put a little fade. Okay, here's the next section. This port is kind of tricky for editing because we have so many quick stops. And this I recorded this specifically because this is where I think most people ruin their guitar tracks because they cut out the silence between every single part in the wrong kind of a way. Now this fairies part by part. So let's see, looks thin the end pad a little bit. Let's just see what this sounds like just like this, because it's right here and it's quick. Okay, it's not too bad, but, um actually need to hear it and headphones because there's a good example of a monitoring environment. When it matters in this room, it's kind of river. Be. So a lot of these cuts sound OK to me, but they might be cutting off really abruptly. And I can't even tell because of all the river been here. So this would be a good time. Teas, Headphones. Okay, a lot of these cuts actually sounded pretty good. We do something for you guys, though. I'm gonna I'm gonna edit this in a different kind of way. Not gonna have any pad at the beginning or the end. So parts of the guitar are just gonna cut off. This is how I hear a lot of people Eddie Guitars. So let's listen to these by themselves. So if you if you wanted to do super edited, that's how you do it would just chop it out a lot. I think that's very simple. Very easy. I don't enjoy the way it sounds, Um, because if you've ever played a guitar, you know, that's not what it sounds like. So that's just my thing. So I like to keep I like to let it breathe just a little bit. You get similar settings where so What are you looking for here is you scroll through the song. Um, just making sure all the cuts are going the right spot right now. I'm almost done here. Okay, that's as tight as I. I feel comfortable editing the guitar. Um, what's, uh now? One other thing that's really easy to mess mess up is the fades on the beginning and end of all your little sections of the guitar. So, like, whenever you have those quick chops, well, I'll just have to do it when you have those quick chops. Sometimes the end of the guitar really sounds like it's just cutting off unnaturally. So it's nice to put a little fade on him. And what's happening here is the beginning is staying. There is actually no fade on the beginning of any of these. They're just cutting in which I like because I think it sounds aggressive. And then the ends are being faded off just so there's no weird pops or, ah, anything like that. So those settings and I did that quick. If you're in pro tools, the the fade the fade in is not a fade, basically, So it's this weird right angle that's pointing to up and left. Um, the link is none. The out shape is just ah, linear fade. And then about 30 milliseconds. It depends on the riffs and the edits, but about 30 30 milliseconds, it is pretty cool. We'll work. So we've got those. We've got those edited. And the next thing I like to do after I listened to it, make sure I like it cool. I like it. I showed the band the band loves it. So to keep everything neat, I consolidate it all the edits are gone. If you If you're not very comfortable with that, just just leave it until you sat with it. You listen to it a bunch of times. Maybe you can't make that choice right away. Um, but I've gotten comfortable enough that I'm cool with doing that. Let's go into how if you did want to e que, uh, guitar and let's use amplitude for that example. Okay, so we got amplitude going here. Let's talk about Q. I got a little eq. You going for this? Um let me see if I can do. Okay. So let me do it. A typical example of what you may logically think when you're when you're mixing and then show you the correct thing to do. Man, these shortcuts. Yes. Okay, so here's the same tone without that tiny little EQ you dip. But you guys have seen that. That's what I chose to do already. But clear that from your minds. You were just listening this tone for the first time. So when you hear that, it sounds to me when I hear that it sounds, box is how it would describe it. So what? Somewhat the way someone else might hear it. And it's important to listen to things right. Someone else may here and say that doesn't have a lot of clarity in the high end. And there's not a lot of balls to it, like there's not a lot of base to that. So what you might do is you might go over here and, uh, still here and put a put a bump over here. Okay, well, I'm gonna get some high end here, and then, uh, let's just throw some throw some low end in there, which is close to a solution, because you do technically have a dip around the same area So let's copy this over here really quick. Seeking your suddenly there's a problem. One doesn't sound it. But to your adding a lot of this stuff in here, so you're clipping so suddenly you have to turn this down. Also, any e que you're using if you're adding especially, is going to change the character of the sound. So if you're using an amp. And you liked the character of the AM and you're adding things from your EQ, you you have to understand that whatever ACU you choose is going to be adding the character of that acute into your tone. So you might think you're doing yourself a favor, Um, and making these changes when in actuality, it's just ruining your tone further and further because you're adding things. Maybe it's not a high quality plug in. Uh, maybe it has nothing to do with what you actually want. How much do you actually use Additive e que? On Qatar's Um, I usually don't like adding anything to guitars. Uh, yes, I'm always taking away. So when you listen to atone, if you know it's a good tone, if you're if you're using a good plug in your using and good AMP. You know you have a good set up. Let's listen to it again. The theme for the good qualities in the tone. I'm hearing a good clarity in the mid range on during the Scrubs, so there's no reason to boost that. And whenever you boost the high end, your boosting Ah, fizzy nous, which is disgusting. I do not like that. So, um, it's important to mix. So anyway, what I've chosen to do was just take away the box, Eunice instead. So trying to target the problem. And if there's try to target in the simplest way possible, instead of saying whom there's not enough low end and there's none of high end, well, hold on that. That's a lot of changes. It's a little boxy, you know? I mean, that is a simple change that it takes a lot of experience to just target something that quick. But this is something I've noticed boxing this and guitar tone, so we just got just from doing that, Um, it got they got based here. What you have to understand is a lot of the accused actually add frequencies when you take away, which seems to make no sense, but it's true. Um, just by taking away the boxing nous, we have added low end way. We've added Lohan and we've added high end by making one simple move without adding anything nasty into it. All right, so, uh, Q is not the only thing that we do with guitars here at the way studio. All right, so we got rhythm guitar. Okay, so I just routed these two ah bus so we can throw compression on it. So you kind of heard with the with the base that there was compression. There was a little bit of compression on their Let me play that one more time. Just so to point out the exact thing that I'm about to show you on the guitar. So the beginning of every phrase here a didn't done done and done didn't So there's like a like a peek at the beginning of everything is like an attack. Um, and that's what I That's what I want to add. So if you add that kind of a thing across the board, you're gonna have a really nice attack. Really nice sound when everything comes together. So I showed a little bit about the, um, the compressor built into, ah, pro tools. Today, I'm going to show you the compressor. One of my favorites, the SSL compressor made by waves. Okay, so first, let's to see what we got, Okay? It's not even being compressed right now. All right? Let's, uh okay, so I'm gonna over compress it, just so you can hear the exact difference that that I'm making whenever I'm doing this, because it is subtle, and it's easy to overdo it. Whenever you're working on one specific thing like you're trying to add this little attack to the guitars, it's easy to two way overdo it, and then have it sound wacky instead of just adding just the amount that you need. So if you're getting that effect, then you you know you've gone far enough, but you don't need to go further than that. Otherwise, you start to mess up other things like the low end is to compressed and another rift sounds strange. So let me just over compressing and hear what I'm talking about. Every time it comes in, sounds like it gets louder for a second. So it's kind of cool to over compress that first so you can actually hear what the beginning of each little phrase sounds like and then back off. So, uh, if you can hear the difference and it is, it is subtle, but it's something that's gonna make a big difference if you understand this. And as you're going through your base, your guitar, maybe your leads are matching up in your kick drum and everything is playing together. You're gonna have very clear, punchy, aggressive sounding chugs you guys could hear when I turned it off. Their, um, the, uh one play with it off, and then I'm gonna turn it on. So watch watch for my mouse here, Theo. At the beginning of those little phrases, it just adds those little spikes which make a huge difference. So it's easy to overdo it. I wouldn't I would probably not go over four db of compression. That's whenever you'll notice as you get into other rifts in the song that is just messing with strange things that it shouldn't really be touching. Yeah, yeah, I can distort if you're If you're compressing too fast, you know it can distort and stuff like that. So you want to make? Sure? Well, the way to get that. I didn't even explain that. But what? What you're hearing, Spike, is is the attack here. And this is a 10 milliseconds um, you could experience with with higher, like, 30 milliseconds or something. That but anything below 10 milliseconds you might not even notice. Uh, but it will be there. But I would say 10 milliseconds to me is ideal. Um, and ratio is how much it's going to be compressed. What is your ratio there? I can't quite see Three shows tend to one. Yeah, this is smashing right now. Um, this is a pretty smooth, huh compressor. So you kind of get away with a lot. And there's a character. It adds to it that the the compressor in pro tools makes everything a little mid rangy sounding. This one kind of Ellis brightens everything up and makes it sound a little clear, in my opinion. So, uh, I would recommend using this if you're going to use compression on guitars. I wouldn't really recommend the the one that's built into pro tools. This is stuff that people didn't tell me. This is stuff that I wish people could tell me, but they you know, I didn't have anybody to ask. It didn't have any reliable resource is and, you know, places like creative life make it possible for everybody. You can take a class in an audio school, and you're just gonna learn, Um, you know how to push buttons. But whenever it really gets down to and you got it, you got to choose a tone. You're not gonna learn how to do that. And so one of the big things that I keep talking about getting a great D I is the key to everything. Finn had his own personal experience working with a lot of Sims. He thought they were terrible. And then suddenly he he grabbed a d. I from a friend professionally recorded, and he threw it through the Sims, and it sounded absolutely perfect. Um, and he loved the Sims. He loves him now, so make sure that your guitars are set up correctly before you go in the studio. Um, tuning is huge. I hope everybody can learn how to tune in this studio from the thing that I talked yesterday is it's ah, something that I think everyone coming in the studio doesn't know about, so I think that's very important editing. It's huge these days, especially in modern music. People like things super tight. But if you kind of like more of a rock and roll, feel a little bit natural, Um, sometimes more aggressive, do less editing. The ghost inside was practically no editing, and that stuff sounds mean. That's it. Sounds disgusting and it's in. It's in a great way. Um, everybody wants to slice the tone pie in one way or another, but you should eat the whole thing.