Mixing "Weather The Storm" pt. 7 - Tweaking

G’day ladies and gents. We’re coming close to the end here with the seventh video in my series on mixing the track, “Weather The Storm”. Check out the links below to catch up on all the rest of the videos that brought us to this point.

Part 1 - Setting up the Session
http://lockyberesford.blogspot.com.au/2015/12/mixing-setting-up-session.html

Part 2 - Balance
http://lockyberesford.blogspot.com.au/2015/12/mixing-weather-storm-pt-2-balance_12.html

Part 3 - Mix Bus Processing
http://lockyberesford.blogspot.com.au/2015/12/mixing-weather-storm-pt-3-mix-bus.html

Part 4 - EQ
http://lockyberesford.blogspot.com.au/2015/12/mixing-weather-storm-pt4-eq.html

Part 5 - Compression
http://lockyberesford.blogspot.com.au/2015/12/mixing-weather-storm-pt4-eq_30.html

Part 6 - Delay And Reverb
http://lockyberesford.blogspot.com.au/2016/01/mixing-weather-storm-pt-6-reverb-and.html

In this video I’m going to be doing the final tweaking of the track. So I’ll be pulling some automation moves, muting parts that I don’t think need to be there and just doing the final touches so that I can master this track and release it.


Attack The Most Important Things First

In this video, I’ve really only done the important things, but that’s a good lesson. When you listen through the track for the final mix, try as hard as you can to not be looking for things to change. Instead, try to enjoy the track and if something stands out to you, then fix it.

This is a great way to ensure that you’re spending your time fixing the things that are the most important to making a great mix. Chances are that if you hear something wrong while enjoying the track, your audience will hear the same thing. The tiny little things are less important, and though it’s the little things that make a great mix, you shouldn’t be working on them in place of the big, noticeable stuff.

As with all the other videos in this session, I was thinking about time. I wanted to get the best mix that I could in the shortest time possible. Partly this was to show you guys how quickly a good mix can come together, and partly because it wouldn’t make for good videos having me sit there for hours on end.


Back to Balance

You’ll notice that the majority of the changes that I made in this video were volume related. This goes back to what I said in the second video that balance is the most important thing in a mix. You can have the most immaculately EQ’d compressed and affected tracks, but if the balance is out, it’ll all sound wrong.

However, in this video I was using automation to fix balances out. In the second video, in which I used the volume faders to get the overall balance of the track how I wanted, I had to use automation here to tweak the different sections of the song.

These volume moves usually weren’t too drastic, mostly bumping up or down about 3dB to either tame sections that were a bit too loud, or bring out the parts that were getting lost in the mix.

Usually these were vocal related changes because they tended to pop out too much or hard to understand. I also brought down the intro to the track so that the beat kicked in a bit harder and also pushed up the guitars in a section to give the track a little more movement.

The other part of balance is the panning. Again, these were fairly simple changes, but ones that needed to be made. In one section the vocals were arranged on tracks that I’d panned, but it didn’t make sense (main parts were panned centre and right, and the other vocal panned left), so I just swapped the parts around on the tracks so that they made a bit more sense.


Unwanted Noises

Another thing I did was a couple of mutes. These were fairly simple as well. There was a sound just before one of the vocal lines that came up in two of the channels. I simply muted those sounds as well as one vocal part which I didn’t really like the sound of.

There is quite a bit of background noise in the vocal tracks throughout the track. Sometimes I would go through and manually cut out all the sounds that aren’t vocal parts. They didn’t really bother me on this track and I couldn’t hear them when they weren’t solo’d.

Again, because we are trying to focus only on the most important parts of the mix, those bits were negligible. You can spend ages going through and cutting out every little bit of track that shouldn’t be there. but you really have to ask if it’s going to make a difference in the end, or if that difference would be worth it.

Some people use gates on vocal channels for this reason, but I feel like you have to be pretty careful when setting up a gate, as they can sometimes cut out the sounds you want to keep and can also introduce some strange stuttering. I would almost always prefer to do that kind of thing manually.


Icing On The Cake

The only other changes were purely just the little things that I thought could benefit the track. I put a stereo widener on the Rhythm guitar track to make the guitar, and song, sound a bit more huge.

I also automated some delays so that they came up at the ends of some of the pivotal lines. Very simple stuff but can be quite effective.

I also gave one of the channels an artistic panning so that a repeated lines changes sides each time. This was something that I felt the part needed to give it a little movement and make it stand out in the mix a bit. Automating panning is a great way to bring a section to life and draw the listener's attention to it.


That’s it for this part. I hope you guys learned something that you can use in your own mixes. Until next time, have a good one!

If you have any questions or comments, please let me know in the section below and I’ll get back to you ASAP.

Mixing "Weather The Storm" pt. 6 - Reverb and Delay

G’day guys! This is my sixth video in my series on mixing “Weather The Storm”. If you missed the other videos, you can check them out in the links below.

Part 1 - Setting up the Session

http://lockyberesford.blogspot.com.au/2015/12/mixing-setting-up-session.html

Part 2 - Balance

http://lockyberesford.blogspot.com.au/2015/12/mixing-weather-storm-pt-2-balance_12.html

Part 3 - Mix Bus Processing

http://lockyberesford.blogspot.com.au/2015/12/mixing-weather-storm-pt-3-mix-bus.html

Part 4 - EQ

http://lockyberesford.blogspot.com.au/2015/12/mixing-weather-storm-pt4-eq.html

Part 5 - Compression

http://lockyberesford.blogspot.com.au/2015/12/mixing-weather-storm-pt4-eq_30.html

In this video I’m going to be adding a bit of reverb and delay to give the track a bit more sparkle. These are just subtle effects that will be added to give the track a sense of space. Many mixing engineers like to go very heavy handed on reverb, but I feel that less is more in this sense.

Creating a space

I like to use reverb in two different ways. The first way is the most important, and that is to create a virtual space for your listener to be in. The second way is more of an effect for individual instruments, but I want to focus on the space creation for this blog.

When I’m mixing a project, I like create a virtual space that the listener is in. In a perfect world, you should be able to close your eyes and imagine that the music is happening around you. You should be able to picture where the sounds are coming from and visualise where you are.

This kind of effect is hard to accomplish if you have a different reverb effect on each channel. If you want to create the virtual space, the sounds within that space should be bouncing off the same walls. This is why I like to use one universal reverb sound for all of the channels.

On this particular track, this was a bit harder to do because the guitar and keys sounds already had reverb on the tracks, and quite a lot of it. But I could do this with the vocals and the drum sounds, and I think it worked quite well.

I like to pick a fairly medium reverb with not too much length. I’d rather a sound that’s a bit more realistic, as opposed the those big 80s gated sounds. I try to pick a reverb sound that makes me feel like I’m in the room with the instruments. For this one I used a medium size plate on Pro Tool’s D-verb plugin.

Put Yourself In That Space

So many times I’ve heard songs where the lead vocal is drowned in reverb and it usually makes the space sound a little weird. Imagine for a second that you’re sitting in a room with a band playing just to you.

I’d think that the drummer would be at the back of the room. The bass player would be just in front of him, maybe slightly to the side. There’d be the guitars and/or keys players scattered left and right, half way up the room. Finally, the singer would be right up in my face, singing at me, trying to make me listen to what they were saying.

Now imagine what that would sound like in terms of reverb levels. The drums, being far back, would have the most reverb. Guitars, bass and keys would have a medium amount of reverb, and so would the backing vocals that they’re singing. The lead singer would have the least, as he/she would be right up close to me.

If you replicate this scenario in your mixing, that’s the kind of space you will create. The more reverb you add to a sound, the further away that sound feels. So, if you’re adding heaps and heaps of reverb to the lead singer, they’re going to sound like they’re sitting at the back of the room, behind the other instruments.

This may be the sound that you’re looking for, but 9 times out of 10, I like to have the singer up front, in my face, trying to make me listen to what they’re saying.

Setting the Delay

I used a very simple sense of delay in this track. Just a ¼ note delay over the main vocals set to a very low level. If I was to be automating the delays, I’d probably bump them up at points and bring them down at other points, but i wanted a sound that wasn’t too distracting and just gave a nice sheen over the sound.

I put the delay up a little bit more on one of the vocal channels because I felt it needed something a little extra.

EQing your Effects Channels

This is very important, and many people don’t bother to do this. In fact I only just started doing this over the last couple of years, but I feel like it’s one of the best things you can do to your effects channels to make them sound good.

It just involves putting an EQ before your effect. Many people like to put the EQ after their delay or reverb, but I feel that the things you’re EQing out can still find their ways into the other frequencies that you’re keeping and drag them down.

You can go fairly in depth with creating an EQ curve for your channel, but I usually just put in a high and low cut filter. Put these in and drag them up and down until you feel like you only have the necessary information left being effected. 

Reverbs are notorious for adding a tonne of low end, muddy sound. Taking these frequencies out of the input of your reverb ensures that you have a nice clean reverb that doesn’t sound like you’ve just dragged your mix through the mud. As I mentioned in other videos, low end builds up very quickly in a mix, making your track sound dull and muddy. Low end in reverb is one of the worst culprits of that.

I also took out some of the sizzling high frequencies as they were a bit too much as well. You can play around with EQ setting for ages, finding a sound that works for you on any given song. Definitely worth the time.

With the delay, I went a bit more drastic with the EQ until I had an almost Telephone type sound going on. This is because I only really wanted a hint of the delay shining through the mix. So, again, taking out those unnecessary highs and lows means that I get the effect I want without filling the mix with unnecessary frequencies.

I hope you guys enjoyed this tutorial, I hope there were some things you learned about reverb and delay and I hope you use these techniques in your own mixes.

Have a good one guys, you’ll hear from me soon.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to put them down in the comments section below.

Recording my EP: Progress Report 1

So, this is a bit of an update on the recording of my EP. I did a blog a couple of weeks ago that outlined my plans for what I was going to do and how I was going to go about it. Check it out here: http://lockyberesford.blogspot.com.au/2015/11/ep-recording-plan.html

I wanted to try a style of writing that meant that I was wasting as little time as possible and trying to get my EP done ASAP. I am notorious for spending way way too long on projects, so I really wanted to tackle this in a way that I was going to get things done.

Each song in an hour

The first part of my plan was to only spend an hour writing each song. I set out a competition a couple of months ago that was to write 7 songs in 7 days and only spent one hour on the writing process. You can see that blog here: http://lockyberesford.blogspot.com.au/2015/11/songwriting-when-theres-no-inspiration.html

This was a great challenge and it really got me into a writing frame of mind. The idea behind it is that you finish the song that you started as soon as possible and then move on. If the song isn’t good, then you throw it away and you’ve only spent a little bit of your life on it… plus you’ve learnt something. And if it’s good, you’ve only spent an hour of your life on it and you’ve got a song.

So, I expanded this idea into the writing of my EP. The plan is to write 20 songs at the start, spending only an hour on each one, and then once finished all of them, listen back through the songs and pick the 10 best songs. Then spend another hour or so fixing up these tracks a bit with a fresh ear. Once all that’s done, pick the 5 best songs that work together well to use on the EP. Do some pre-production for those and then hit the recording studio.

Now, a little bit down the track, I’ve finished part 1! I’ve written my 20 songs. This was really interesting because I saw my writing style change over the time I was writing these tracks. Some tracks came together very quickly towards the end. 

Practicing writing these songs quickly meant that I started getting a lot better at coming up with parts that were needed to finish the song. Also, the parts that I put in were getting better and better.

I feel like I am coming up with the same amount of original song ideas as I was before, but now I’m quickly using these ideas and turning them into songs a lot quicker and a lot more efficiently. In this way, some of those good ideas aren’t forgotten or used in songs that aren’t as good.

The important part about finishing a track in an hour is that you get rid of all the unnecessary things that distract you from writing a song. It’s also a good idea to put yourself into the right frame of mind. When I sit down to write a song, I like to turn off all distractions. Put the phone on aeorplane mode, have all your writing and recording equipment ready and close your door to what’s going on outside. This is pure songwriting time.

Picking the Best 10 Songs

This was easy on some counts and hard on others. I ended up liking more songs than I thought I would. I had to think about what I wanted the EP to sound like and get rid of some tracks that I thought were good but wouldn’t fit in with the sound I was going for.

One thing that I didn’t think would end up happening is that I put a couple of the tracks aside in another pile that I thought would suit a different instrumentation.

My idea for this EP is to have mainly acoustic guitar and vocals dominating the sound and use piano, percussion, electric guitar and some strings to fill out the songs that need it, depending on what I felt was necessary. I’m avoiding a drum kit driven, rock n roll production… for this EP at least.

Some of the tracks that I had there would really suit a drum kit and some heavy guitars, so instead of throwing them out, I decided I’d put them aside and either record them on their own or make an EP of similar sounding tracks later down the line.

Admittedly, there were some songs that I had written that were just complete rubbish and will never see the light of day again, but at least I know that now. If anything, during this process, I’ve learnt a lot about songwriting and how to get a decent track done quickly.

Stage 2 - After The First Cull

Now I’ve gotta go through the tracks that I’ve picked and spend a little more time with them. I have all the basics down but I want to change up some of the lyrics for parts that I don’t particularly like and make sure my chord progressions are sounding alright.

I also want to get an idea of where the tempo should be for each track. Sometimes this means being a little faster than what I did the original demo at, and sometimes it’s a little slower. I have a tendency to play things a little too slow when recording, especially if it’s already quite a slow song.

So I’ll pick a new tempo and record the track again with the minor adjustments made. I am also looking at the arrangement of the track to make sure that it can’t be any better. The good thing about not having listened to these tracks since I wrote them, is that I’m coming in with fresh ears and am not feeling so attached to them.

I can pick out, on the first listen, what I think needs to go, and what I think sounds really good. Doing these changes in only an hour again means that I, once again, am wasting little time on the things that don’t matter and focusing only on what’s really important. 

There’s a chance that any of these songs could be thrown out during the next cull so it’s good not to waste time on the small stuff. 

I didn’t think I’d be doing this but I’ve also started adding little ideas of extra instruments to these tracks during this second demoing phase. I am consciously trying not to look for things that should be added, but if something comes to mind that I think “wow, that would be really cool” I add it in to see how it sounds. 

All in all, things are going really well and I’m excited to be finally recording my first EP as a solo artist. Hopefully there’ll be many more to come. 

HOT TIP: There’s a FaceBook group called “Song A Week 2016” in which each member writes a song each week to put to the community and they discuss songwriting techniques and it’s a really good, music loving community. I’ll be taking part in that.

I invite you all to try out this method of writing songs and if you have any questions, comments or music you want me to check out, let me know in the comments below.

Mixing "Weather The Storm" Pt.5 - Compression

G’day everybody. This is the fifth part in my series of mixing “Weather The Storm”. My friend Jaye gave me this track wondering if I could help him make it brighter, clearer and punchier. I decided to go through a basic process of how I would go about mixing the track from start to finish. Here are the other videos if you missed them.

Part 1 - Setting up the Session

http://lockyberesford.blogspot.com.au/2015/12/mixing-setting-up-session.html

Part 2 - Balance

http://lockyberesford.blogspot.com.au/2015/12/mixing-weather-storm-pt-2-balance_12.html

Part 3 - Mix Bus Processing

http://lockyberesford.blogspot.com.au/2015/12/mixing-weather-storm-pt-3-mix-bus.html

Part 4 - EQ

http://lockyberesford.blogspot.com.au/2015/12/mixing-weather-storm-pt4-eq.html

In this video I’ll be adding some compression to the tracks. Through this video I’ll be using Pro Tool’s “Dynamics 3” which is the standard compressor that comes free with the DAW. I use this one here to show you that you don’t need expensive plugins to get a great sound.

Vocal Compression

I started by putting a compressor on the first vocal sound in the track. I did this because it was the first sound that jumped out at me as needing compression. On the voice, some of the louder parts were a bit too loud and some of the quieter words were hidden in the mix a bit.

I used a very basic compressor setting for this with a fast attack (1ms), fast release (37ms), medium ratio (3:1), small knee (10dB) and then brought down the threshold so it was hitting the compressor lightly on the medium level vocals and definitely being effected on the louder notes. I then brought up the gain until it matched the level of the input on the louder parts.

This was a fairly basic setting and I could have gone through and changed the settings for each vocal part, but because they were similar parts with the same singer, it was a lot easier to copy the compressor through to each part. I always have the option to change the settings on each one down the track if I feel like there’s something not quite right with them.

After this, I also added a compressor on the Vocal Bus. This one was a little bit softer with a 2:1 ratio, extremely fast attack (10 microseconds), fast release (37.7ms) and big knee (20dB).

Because this setting is so soft on account of the bigger knee and the low ratio, I could bring the threshold down a bit to make sure the vocals are getting affected. I added this compressor to tame and glue all the vocals together a bit more and also because there are parts where second and third vocals come in during phrases and I wanted to make sure the vocals didn’t get too loud in those parts.

Pumping Drums

I added another compressor to the Drum Bus, however the purpose of this one is a little different to the one I had used for the vocals. Instead of levelling out the sounds, I used this compressor emphasize the transients in the drums and create a bit more feel. 

I started by using the sidechain to choose the frequencies that would trigger the compressor and put a high cut all the way down to 250Hz. This means that only the sound of the kick drum will be triggering the compressor.

I then used a slow attack (38ms) so that you get to hear the punch on the kick and snare hits before the compressor starts working. I used a very slow release, almost half a second, and this was where the compressor finishes releasing just before the next beat, and this is what gives it the pumpy sound.

I used a fairly low ratio (2:1) and the threshold was high so it’s not really affecting the sound too much. When you A/B the compressed track to the dry track, you can’t really hear the sound being compressed but it has a bit more “movement”. I find it hard to explain, but when you bypass it, it starts sounding very robotic. Give it a try to give you electronic drums some more feel.

Usually in a rock production with a live drum kit, percussion, bass and acoustic guitars, there would be a lot more compression required. However, because most of the other sounds were distorted and heavily effected guitars, samples and synths, they didn’t really need compressing and sat very well in the mix already.

If you have any comments or questions about this process, feel free to hit me up in the comments section below. Until next time, have a good one!

Mixing "Weather The Storm" Pt.4 - EQ

G’day guys! This is the fourth video in my series on mixing “Weather The Storm”, an industrial track by my friend Jaye. He sent it in to me and asked how I would mix it and I thought I’d make a video series going through all the basics of how I mix it.

Part 1 - Setting up the Session

http://lockyberesford.blogspot.com.au/2015/12/mixing-setting-up-session.html

Part 2 - Balance

http://lockyberesford.blogspot.com.au/2015/12/mixing-weather-storm-pt-2-balance_12.html

Part 3 - Mix Bus Processing

http://lockyberesford.blogspot.com.au/2015/12/mixing-weather-storm-pt-3-mix-bus.html

In this video, I’m going through my EQ moves for the individual tracks in the session. In the Mix Bus blog, I go through how I put an EQ over the mix bus to get the overall feel of the track right, but here I’m getting a bit more in depth.

Speed Racer

You may notice that I get through the EQing of the track in under 10 minutes. This is an extremely quick EQ of the track, but in those 10 minutes I get the song sounding very close to finished using minimal EQ moves.

It’s tempting to get bogged down into soloing each track in the mix one by one and labouring over the individual EQ’s until they sound perfect. I used to do this, but soon found that this process is both extremely time consuming and a bit counter-intuitive.

If you get EQ each individual track by itself, you’ll spend a lot of time getting that one track to sound good by itself. Then, you’ll put it back into the mix. Many of the moves you’ll make will be inaudible, so you’ve wasted time. Some of the other moves will clash with the rest of the mix, so it will sound worse.

Instead, I think it’s more beneficial to listen to the mix as a whole and think about what jumps out to you. A/B with your reference track and check with what you think the song needs. Then you can use your EQ to make those changes in your mix, and then go back and check to see if it helped.

This style of mixing is much more productive, as every move that you make is audible and benefits the mix in a way that you feel is important.

You may have noticed that I put all my EQs in this video in the last insert of each track. The reason for this is that Pro Tools has a feature where you can bypass every insert in a given slot (this one is insert E), by holding Command+option (Control+Alt for PC) and clicking on the insert. Because I have nothing else in these inserts, I can very quickly reference where I started today and where I finished up. Very handy!

Cut The Lows, Boost The Highs

You may have noticed during the video that I was cutting a lot of the low end out of tracks and that I was boosting a lot of high end. You may also remember that in my Setup and Mixbus videos I did the same thing, and by now we have a lot less low end than when we started.

This isn’t a common rule in every single mix that I do, but I tend to find that getting a bright and clear sound usually means cutting quite a bit of low end. Low frequencies tend to build up very quickly in a mix, and they get in the way of the sounds of the low end instruments that you want to be nice and bassy.

I find that cutting the lows from sounds that don’t need it means that sounds like Kick drums and Bass guitar are punchier, tighter and more impactful. There’s also a lot of talk about how speakers can produce other frequencies more accurately when they aren’t occupied with unnecessary low frequency information, but that’s a topic for another day.

My reasons for boosting a lot of the high end in the tracks was because it sounded like it needed it. When A/Bing against the reference track, my mix was sounding a little bit dull, especially in the vocals, so boosting up that high end really gave the mix a bit more clarity and bite.

The rest of the EQ moves mostly involved picking frequencies that I felt sounded a bit annoying and pulling them out a little bit. You’ll notice that I didn’t do anything too drastic, but pulling a little bit from these frequencies that sounded wrong to me in each instrument made quite a bit of difference in the end result.

If you have any questions or comments about this blog, feel free to post in the comments section below. Until next time, Have a good one guys!!!

Recording Your Practice: A Guide To Better Performance

I’ve been doing a lot of blogs recently about production and recording. This one is also about recording, but it’s really about performance. If you’re a singer, songwriter, guitarist, pianist or just about any other type of performer, this one is for you!

Many musicians get to a point in their practice where they just don’t know what to do. I know I’ve been there several times before. A point where, although you know you can always improve, you just don’t know where to start.

I suggest, that if you haven’t been doing it already, start recording yourself performing. This came as a big turning point for me in my practice and made me rethink how I play. With today’s technology, there’s no reason not to be tracking what you’re doing and listening back to it.

Realising Your Weaknesses

I remember the first time I got into a recording studio to record some songs as a teenager. At this point, I’d been playing in a band for ages, played guitar for almost 10 years and done countless live shows.

All was well and good, we got into the studio (some guys house) and we’d laid down the drums. When it came to me playing my guitar parts, I plugged in, had the track in my ears and played along. All was good… until I listened back to my parts.

They were awful. The tone was all out, my playing was out of time and the notes were inconsistent. I was a little heart broken, but the rest of the band didn’t seem to care that much. So I played through the tracks again and again till they were close enough

Then came the vocals. I was singing in this band and I wasn’t very good back then, but I got by. But there was something about singing in the studio that completely threw me off. I’ve seen it many times since, working behind the desk. Some singers can tear it up live but as soon as you put them in front of a mic in the studio, their throats close up and they can’t perform.

I don’t know what the reasons are behind this phenomenon, but some singers just cannot sing in a recording setting. Thankfully, like everything else, this is something that can, and should be practiced.

If you’ve ever heard your voice recorded, you know how much different you sound in your head, compared to what plays back to you. Singing is exactly the same, and this difference can throw a lot of people off. The same can happen with playing an instrument: what you’re hearing while you’re playing can sound very different to what’s being recorded… so what should you do?

Practice being recorded

It’s almost too obvious, but very few musicians actually practice recording themselves. Of all the practicing techniques that I’ve tried over my twenty odd years of performing, recording myself practicing has made the biggest difference to almost every aspect of my performance.

Here’s an exercise for you:

1.  Take a lick or a riff that you know
2. Figure out a tempo for that lick/riff and set it up on a metronome.
3. Hit record and play it in as best you can.
4. Now here’s the important part. Listen. Is it in time? Is your tone right? Is every note in pitch? Are you being consistent with your playing? If you heard this playing on a professional record, would it be acceptable? 
5. If the answer to any of these questions is “no” then you have to address the problem, and try again.
6. And again
7. And again

Keep recording and changing little things in your performance until this one little lick or riff is 100% perfect. You should listen to the final product and think “there is nothing I would change about the playing of this”. 

When you start this type of practice, it might seem impossible to get to that point where you are completely happy. Try not to stress yourself out, you might be attempting something too hard from the start. Either slow the riff down a bit or try something a little more simple.

Singing Exercise

This one is for singers, but can be used in a similar way for any other instrument. This is an amazing exercise for improving your performances in a huge way. If you’ve never recorded yourself singing before, I definitely suggest you give this a try, it could change your life.

First, pick a song that you know pretty well. Make sure you choose one that is in a comfortable key for you. It could be one that you’ve sung a thousand times before, but that’s good. For the start it’s best to pick something that you know the melody and lyrics for. We want to focus on the performance more than anything else here.

Take that song and load it up into your recording software. Then you need to set up a track for your microphone to record your voice. You’ll need to balance the tracks so that you can easily hear your voice clearly over the song.

If you don’t have recording equipment or software, use your phone. Simply play the song through whatever system you have and sing over the top of it, making sure you can hear yourself clearly. Most phones these days have recording facilities. This isn’t an ideal way of doing it, but it’s better than nothing.

Hit record on whatever device you’re using and record yourself singing through the track from start to finish. This is going to be your reference for when you started, so you can mute this track and put it aside for later. It’s important to show your progress so you can see how far you’ve come.

Next, I want you to skip to about a bar before the first line comes in, hit record and sing only the first line of the song. You’re going to be tracking this one line at a time.

Now listen back to your performance of that one line. Was it in pitch? Was it in time? Did it sound strained? How was your pronunciation? Did you have enough breath? Was there enough feeling in it? Did you emphasize the right words? What is it that you could do better?

Pick the one thing that stands out to you the most as being wrong with the performance. Focus on that one thing and record the line again. Listen back and keep recording that line until you’ve fixed that first thing that you wanted to fix. 

Once you’ve got that right, fix the next thing that you think needs improvement on that line. Dissect each part of your performance until it is exactly how you would want it to be heard. Once that first line is right, move to the second line of the song and do the exact same thing.

You’ll find the first line is the hardest to get right, as you’re going to be trying to really find your voice. As you move on, things will get a little easier as you learn little tricks of how to manipulate your voice to get the sounds you want.

When you get the end of the verse, record it all the way through from start to finish. Now compare that to the version you recorded at the very start of the session and hear how much better you are than where you began.

This technique is very important because it not only teaches you how to be good on the track that you’re recording at that moment, but also how to get better, quicker on other songs. You will soon learn what to change to get different sounds, and how the mechanics of your voice works.

Many people, when practicing, focus on things that they can quantify. They want to get faster playing, bigger ranges, more repertoire, more scales. But the most loved musicians are the ones that have those qualities that can’t be quantified. It doesn’t matter if you can technically play the hardest song in the world, if you can’t play the easiest song and make it sound good.

Do you record yourself playing? Have you got any great tips on improving your performance? Any questions or comments? Hit me up in the comments section below!

Mixing "Weather The Storm" Pt. 3 - Mix Bus

Hey guys, this is the 3rd video in my series of mixing “Weather The Storm”. If you missed the last two videos, here are the links for you.

Setting Up The Session:

http://lockyberesford.blogspot.com.au/2015/12/mixing-setting-up-session.html

Balance:

http://lockyberesford.blogspot.com.au/2015/12/mixing-weather-storm-pt-2-balance_12.html

In this video I’m going to be taking you through the mix bus processing. This means I’ll be adding processing to my Master Bus to control what is happening over my whole mix. This style of mixing is called a “top down” approach.

What Is a Top Down Approach and Why Use It?

This is a style of mixing that I first encountered while reading a blog on The Recording Revolution. If you haven’t heard of it, check out www.therecordingrevolution.com for heaps of great articles and videos on home recording and mixing techniques.

For their description of the Top Down Approach, here’s a link: 

http://therecordingrevolution.com/2014/03/14/the-art-of-top-down-mixing/

Basically, this is the technique of adding processing to the mix busses in your chain first in order to save time. This kind of mixing means that you get bigger results to the sound of the mix in less moves of the mouse.

For example: you find that your mix is muddy at around the 300Hz mark. You could:

a) Go through each track in your mix, taking out frequencies of each track to try to get rid of that muddiness, or

b) Put an EQ on the mix bus and pull out 300 Hz.

I find that this is a great way to get your mix sounding the way you want it quicker and with less stress. Sounds tend to come together easier, and you feel better about the sound of your mix earlier on in the process.

There’s a lot of people out there that feel that there should be no processing on the mix bus and that side of things should be saved entirely for the mastering engineer. But in this modern world of limitless, high quality processing, I think we should not be sending anything to a mastering engineer that isn’t exactly how we want it.

One thing to note here is that all of these changes can be undone, altered and removed in the future, should there be some processing in your mix that calls for a change in the mix bus. Although, for the most part, these Mix Bus moves will shape the overall sound of your track.

So, what did you do?

You can watch the video and see exactly how I went about adding the processing to the mix bus, but I’ll go over it a little bit here as well. 

I started by adding an EQ. I think this is the most important part of the mix bus processing and it’s where you’ll hear the biggest changes. I used the 7 band EQ that comes free with Pro Tools and I used that one because I wanted to show that you don’t need fancy plugins to get a great sound.

I started by running a low cut filter up to about 30Hz. This gets rid of any of the ultra low sub information that just muddies up the mix and takes up valuable energy. At this level, these frequencies are practically inaudible.

I then pulled up the low mid EQ and swept it until I found the wooly frequencies. This mix has a lot of those low mids that are filling up the mix so I wanted to find where they were the worst. I pulled them out by about 1.5dB. This is only a small move, but over the mix bus, it’s quite noticeable.

I then went up to the high mids to find where I could add a little more punch and presence to the mix. I ended up settling at around 2kHz, and boosting that by about 2dB. On top of that I also added a high shelf to the upper frequencies of about 0.5dB to give the mix a little more shimmer.

I then added a compressor to the mix. I ended up using waves C1 compressor, which I stated in the video was free, but actually it’s not. Don’t stress though, you can use a standard compressor with similar functionality in the exact same way.

With this compressor, I didn’t use it in the standard way of bringing down the loud parts and bringing up the quiet parts. In fact, I used to to accentuate the loud parts and made it pump to the beat of the song.

The way I did this, is have the threshold trigger only on the kick and snare, and then set a medium ratio (about 4:1). I then dialled up the attack until it let quite a bit of the transient of the kick and snare through. I pushed the release back until it was finished releasing just before the next kick or snare hit.

This style of compression really gives the sound a bit more life as the song pumps in and out to the beat. You will hear this effect on lots of dance tracks, although they usually make it a lot more obvious. What to listen for here is the feel of the track, rather than an obvious compression. When I A/B’d the compressor, you can hear the track get a bit more life and movement to it when enabled.

Finally, I put in a Slate Tape Emulation plugin. This adds the sound of tape saturation to the track, which is a hard thing to explain. It’s not a distortion, EQ, or compressor. It’s more like a combination of all three that has been carefully made to give a pleasant, musical sound.

These types of plugins usually aren’t cheap, but I absolutely love this one and use it on almost every project I do. It’s not necessary for mix bus processing, however I really like how it sounds. 

Make sure you subscribe up the top so you know when I release my next blog. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to chuck it in the comments section below. Until next time, have a good one!