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Mix Bus Processing on Drums

Lesson 26 from: Studio Pass with Joey Sturgis

Joey Sturgis

Mix Bus Processing on Drums

Lesson 26 from: Studio Pass with Joey Sturgis

Joey Sturgis

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Lesson Info

26. Mix Bus Processing on Drums

Next Lesson: Mixing Guitars

Lesson Info

Mix Bus Processing on Drums

Do you know of any good trance? Uh transient designers for mac good question I don't I've heard that the spl is okay I think um I think maybe t racks has one but I'm not one hundred percent sure uh t rex has one and there's ah flux makes one too I've heard okay things about yeah I would say just especially with transient designers there should be enough info out their toe figure out if you're either if you want to buy it or if you maybe a demo that you can try um I think there is a way to maybe use dominion on mac but you would have to do some kind of weird like patchwork type stuff like some kind of like vsd converter or whatever but I think it's possible um yeah, awesome. Do we have any any questions from anybody right now? Um some moving through a lot of stuff can ugo over what compression side chaining isn't how to use it? Um all right, so I can but I don't think I mean, I can show you quickly what it does yeah, and then let's move on tio stars because it really isn't that importan...

t, okay, but if you did have a compressor let's say on your, uh well, okay, let me tell you what side chaining does sight chaining is feeding a compressor a different signal than the one that it's affecting so if I put aside if I put a compressor on my guitar track and then I feed my kick into the side chain of the compressor every time the kick hits it's going to compress the guitar that's what signed chain compression does it's not that cool people talk about it on the internet like it's the coolest thing ever but here's what it would do so every time the kick hits turns the guitar down, one thing you can do with that is you can actually take your vocal track if you get all of your music tracks bust into a group you can put a compressor on the beat on the music and then send the side chain of your vocal into that compressor and it'll turn down the music every time the vocals come in on dh you khun adjust it so it you know however much you wanted to turn down you can change those settings of course and so it's nice because when you have a situation where the guitars air just like a wall of sound and the vocals they're having trouble cutting through, you use the side chain and every time the vocalist sings apart the guitars get turned down a little bit it's just like an automatic way of automating stuff so there's there's that question about the snare right now you're processing it. Are you just processing the, uh, direct direct micro processing the overhead as well? So this is just the direct mike that came off of the sst that I printed and I just did e q compression, transit designer and clipper. And you, uh, use the snare room from sst at all? Or do is that you could yeah, and I think it's in here somewhere I just haven't gotten to it yet, but yeah, I think it was in one of these tracks, let's. See, I'll show you what I like to do it throne rooms because, um, germs, they're cool and they give you a lot of ah, a lot of help. When you drum sound, I'd say fifty percent of a drum sound his drum room. Honestly, I like to go in and do like a seventy six. Pretty crunchy theo. Sorry, theo. Yeah, I like the compress it really hard? I mean, just go nuts with when you combine that back in with your mix. Er so yeah, and like, if you look at thea, let me, uh, pull up the actual drug mix from this song, you'll see that I have quite a bit of room in there, so yeah, pretty roomy turning guitars down a little bit turned us down and one thing I wanted to do I wanted to talk about drum mixing before I wrap this up is finalizing um the way that I like to do my drum stuff is uh I like to get it to what I call a zero point and what I mean by that is I want to get my drums so that they're basically on audio stem that I can haul around in different sessions so like this is the drum stem from the original song that we played from my original mix so I actually have a clipper on here I've got my drums finalized their their hit basically hitting zero theo all the drums air mixed volume wise and wise they're all relative to each other so the snare and the kick are pretty much equal in volume um they have like the same amount of punch same with the toms toms theo and then I've got my cymbals at a nice comfortable level and then that all of the drums that stuff that make up the drums sound are going to go to a single group track so let's actually do that right now let me see so take all those go to the group check out my group theo okay so I see the snare now is poking through on the overheads and I don't like what it's doing to my snare sound so would actually put a limiter on there and cut that snare hit off show you how to do that so this is the overhead track that we're looking at you can see how the snares just way louder than the other drunk the other simulated so if I just actually lower this down starting to cut that snare off and there's also some frequencies in the low end area that I'm taking care of. So anyway, as you get all your drums into your group, you're gonna want to calibrate it so that you're not going over zero again, okay? And then sometimes I like to do a compressor for all the drums like all the drums together going through a compressor uh for that I'm going to use er like a seventy six theo from there we'll probably clip and this is this is what I'm talking about getting the drums to zero by clipping it um you're going to get some loudness out of it, but you're also going to get it kind of equalized out so that it's not it's something that you can bounce into away file and without having to worry about losing your sound wait no, I feel like kicking a little hot is gonna turn it down a little bit, okay, so now that I have it set up like this, I can literally just bounce that as a stand because it's not going over zero and so I can always I can always mix off of that like I'll be able to mix in relation to the loudness of my uh of my drums so let me just bounce that out I'm gonna call it drum mics and lot of times you can get the reverb from your drums just by the rooms now there's there are cases where you want to add reverb like especially on snare hits like on slower parts I'd like to have a lot more reverb on my snare than I do faster parts and I'll go in and actually automate those and so this is basically this is the part where I'm talking about finalizing and printing the stereo mics um once you've done that you could do a lot more with the drums so like now here's my audio stem of my drum mics I can actually take this track and duplicate it and then add like distortion to the duplicated track it's way probably not the right distortion and try a different one okay, so what you can do with this now is that can actually use that track to, uh bring more energy to certain parts so like for the chorus e just I can go in and raise the volume of that distortion track ah, a little bit of uh uh excitement and energy to the party theme e just literally just fly that in like this ah got it going twice. Thie other great thing about this is you can do a lot of really cool like effects and stuff. So if you wanted to make like a drum fill, have like a flander, I mean, now that it's audio stand you can, like, do anything with it so I could just add a flanders like this and go to where is it this one this'll make it really easy to do kind of cool stuff like that, which you, you know, if you just leave all of your drum tracks separate and your mix, you can't really do stuff like that's. Not as easy. It also take more processing power. So I think it's important to actually just commit to your drum sound and just literally bounce it out to an audio file and just go from there. Because if you if you leave everything open, you end up with analysis paralysis and you'll sit there and tweak stuff basically forever. So it's nice to just kind of put your foot down and, uh, and make a decision.

Class Materials

bonus material with enrollment

Syllabus
What is Vocal Production
Autotune Pitch Correction Modes and Tools
Understanding Pitch Graphing
Timing and Quantization
Vocal Mixing
Separating Lead & Background in Mixing
Mixing Harmonies & Adv Production Technique

Ratings and Reviews

Tim
 

I have been following Joey's work since the early Prada days... This is one of the best discussions any producer has ever contributed to digital audio. I love the amount of transparency. He simply reveals everything and guides you on a very wise path on how to become a in-the-box producer like him! Turns out, the answer is -- a ton of hard work! Plus, this has to be the best use-case on his own awesome and super-affordable plugins. I have watched almost every popular producer/engineer workshops and have also sat-in on Eddie Kramer, Alan Parsons and Quincy Jones producer workshops and believe it or not... This is the best one yet.

Adam Train
 

I'll be honest, I'm not a fan of the bands Joey records. The only reason I bought this class was because I enjoyed the Periphery one so much. Joey takes modern production techniques to the absolutely extreme. He takes punch-ins and editing to a level where it's not even funny any more. If you're looking for tips on recording and mixing in general, this class is not for you. If you're looking for editing tips to see how far you can possibly push the strive for perfection, this is pretty spot on. If you're a beginner, don't take this class to heart - Joey's workflow is borderline psychopathic - go and get the Periphery session instead. If you've been recording for a while and you're looking to see how far editing can take you, it's worth a look.

a Creativelive Student
 

Easily one of the best investments I've made. There is so much information here that you'll have to watch it multiple times to really catch everything. Looked up to Joey Sturgis for a long time and this is literally a dream come true to get a behind the scenes look into his talent. He delivered the material in a very understandable fashion and was extremely clear with all his examples. I love creative live =)

Student Work

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