"The plugin doesn't matter" - If people take nothing from this very informative video, take this. Stop spending $1000s of dollars on plugins, get good at the plugins you have, and acquire new ones individually as needs arise so you can master that plugin. Great video, very informative. I was recording at London Bridge studio here in Seattle and I was talking with the owner (who was an intern in the early 90s) about some of the most important things he ever learned, and he told me that seeing how the producer/engineer handled Chris Cornell's voice. He said they had to keep stacking compressors on it in order to tame his insane dynamic range. But that idea of not putting all of the burden on a single compressor to fix every issue has really stuck with me.
Man I struggled with this for years by complicating things , if I had your videos and approach, It would have save me a tones of frustration and time . I really recommend all your courses to any new or medium level mixer , cheers Bobby 🍻
Very good video! Those that complain about squashing or ruining the mix doing this, completely overlook that you have to be subtle! Over-compression, saturation, limiting, and soft-clipping WILL ruin your mix. The trick is to not be lazy and throw all your processing on a bus and hope it works. Take the time to attack the transient tracks individually, fatten the non-transient tracks subtly, and remove resonances to increase loudness while maintaining clarity. If you’re unsure you’re doing it right, GET A REFERENCE TRACK to check yourself! Don’t marry the meters and live by what they say. After you balance your mix (without plugins), you can focus on taming the transient information, but make sure you listen to your before-and-after to make sure you’re not straying away from the balance you’ve created.
Gosh - was just driving home thinking ‘I need to tame my drums even more than I did the last time they were too mental’ so I can get some clarity and separation with the other instruments. And here is this awesome vid explaining how to do it! Thank you! I don’t make heavy music like you do - but the lessons apply across multiple genres. Great stuff 👏👏👏
I over compressed the drums and balanced them too loud. I used Addictive drums. Listened with cheap headphones. While hitting a limiter, my songs were still quite quiet. I think I used to hit -14 RMS while still sounding okay. Couldn't push it harder without sounding like crap. These days I use these steps (clipping being the greatest help) and it's definitely getting there. Now I just need to work on writing good songs that are worth mixing 😅.
Thanks again bobby for recalrifying things for us, you always seem to drop these videos just when i need thrm lately lol also if anyone id using FL studio, try using the fruity soft clipper on your drum buss to tame your transients, ive been doing this and it both tames my transient and makes my drums a little lower resonant :)
To be honest I've never really had this issue. I've always been conscious of high and low passing specific frequencies and keeping a good healthy gain staging throughout. And using a bit of mix buss compression small eq and sometimes a bit of saturation (subtle). And that's kind of it. I also love the magma BB tubes for that saturation on the mix bus. I know a lot of folks abuse that Oxford inflator and it will add bad harmonics at a point. Shadow hills for compression. Always works. That or ssl. Maybe some limiting (soft).. I don't even use tape saturation anymore for more modern stuff. I've also noticed those tape plug ins all sound wildly different. That kiive tape face is almost too much at a low setting. Ymmv. But I agree with all of this I am also not a pro mixer. I have a modest bedroom studio. But I've had tons of people asking me latley how it sounds so polished. Little small moves man. All adds up. Also number one rule. The source. That's most important and the player.
I learned to do this in your courses. Got a clipper (BSA) on the tracks that need it, to put a cap on and control peaks. Then Waves SSL buss comp, PSP Vintage Warmer and Waves L2 limiter.. Only difference is that i add just a tiny little touch of saturation (drive knob) with the Vintage Warmer. Works everytime. Sometime even to nicely, as you can now crank it up quite loud before it start to get nasty...😂🤟
What I learned from you is to stop keep looking for many gimmicks to buy when I had all the resources in reaper itself and with one of your videos seeing that you achieve one of the best tone i heard whit simple plug-ins from reaper was the wow factor for me I'm talking about the reaper guitar template 🤘🤘🤘🤘🔥🔥🔥🔥
Bobby, I'm curious - Why such low signal levels (-22dB Drums Submix for example)? Your SSL makeup is cranked to the max! Sounds good nevertheless, bro.
I would like to know about this too. My recording levels are -18 or slightly higher. I've tried recording with lower levels and then when I try to get to a good level on my master bus it just sounds smashed and like shit. What am I doing wrong?
If you hit a clipper or a limiter hard it’s gonna color you mix and the mix can fall apart. Good mastering engineers can fix this but a diy engineer can get frustrated by this. Indeed do a lot of little clipping, limiting and saturation each time you sum channels. When you sum channels new peaks can appear, by eating a little bit of the peaks trough out the signal chain the new peaks through summing don’t add up on the mix bus so the masterbus compressor only moves a little on the highest peaks of the track. This way the masterbus compressor stays transparent. There’s a interesting production technique for mixing loud, it’s called clip to zero. I don’t know if can pull this technique off because I’m mixing hybrid, but I definitely want to try this method 😊 sum sum sum
Hey, thanks for the video. Can you show the whole Clipping transient thing on the drums a bit more? Maybe with a shootout of different plugins. I've seen your drum Bus at -22 and and your SSL bus Comp pushing +15 db in the output. So it's also correct to mix at -7 and don't push the make up gain on the BusComp or am I wrong?
I would love to know the answer to this question as well. +15 db of make up gain on the comp and the Ozone Maximizer threshold set at -18db with only 2db of gain reduction. I'm doing it all wrong! lol
@@billyhughes9776 I Dont Think you are doing it wrong. my mixes are way hotter on the mixbus without using makeup gain. I had some Sessions to mix Through the Slate Academy and they are all way hotter. In the end i think the thing is, if it sounds good it is good.if you are not clipping and distroting the hell out of your tracks, everything will be fine.
@@larsmusicde I never clip the Mix Bus and don't use make up gain on my mix bus compression. Was just wondering curious as to his methods. I'm mostly satisfied with my mixes at this point. Thanks for the reply -- take care.
What would happen if you did the steps, achieved a great mix and then slammed it through whatever? Some bedroom producer guy put out a ton of super harsh clipped electronic music and recently surpassed Darude as the most streamed Finn
I am a beginner in mixing, I have tried cutting on sub frequencies but I am always hesitant to do so, coz I really like how heavy it makes the track sound, but I always struggle to get that right, my mix ends up muddy or ends up lacking any sub freq, specially between bass guitar and kick... can you suggest me some trick or could you make a video on that, it will be very very helpful
hi , ive watched you for a good while now and enjoy your videos alot , they are always very helpful . im trying desperately to mix my band and feel like im hitting a dead end , could i possibly send you a mix im working on to get some feedback , i would love for someone who works in this area to give me some pointers other than my friends just agreeing it sounds good just to please me thanks
Beginner engineer here. How to you make a drum sub mix? do you just cut the sub frequencies and make them a separate track to mix them individually? Could an alternative be using a multiband compressor and compressing the lower frequencies on the drum bus?
Mix the right way and the mix will be loud enough before even using any other plugin like saturation, limiter etc to make it louder. But is louder better? I brought out the Black Sabbath Demunizer album to the car. I hadn't listened to that album for years. Cranked it loud when driving and it was so pleasing to my ears. Then I took another CD, (can't remember which one or the band right now)and cranked the volume. Mixed and mastered a couple of years ago. So bad it sounded. It was a torture to listen to. Even at less loud volume it sounded bad.
Is louder better? It doesn't really matter as you have a volume control on virtually any device available today. While there are certainly standards which translate universally, and which might have changed overtime, it's up to the listener how loud they want any given musical piece playing. As you and as Bobby here state, the essential difference is between loud and hard, where the latter is simply intolerable unless you have enough earwax dampening so you are basically deaf. While it may be subjective, I think this whole subject became an issue only after the 2000's. IE. radio sations or some other platform where individual songs compete plays between another where an algorithm decides what the consumer want's to hear. If something stands out from the bulk, it is instantly put aside from the competition. Which modern music is, a product to shill out some other product. In short; it doesn't matter either way if the mix and the master are shit. This might come of as an elitist circlejerk but the same effect can be observed in movies and television. Luckily, no-one has to suffer it willingly except in extreme circumstances. I mean, many modern cars don't even have a CD-player. "A what? It's got Spotify and a share button". Apologies, somewhat sidelined comment but I personally feel intolerable pain when great compositions suffer from this bullshit which suddenly became a standard without reason.
Haha oh man, I saw a Deadmau5 video of him using L2 Maximizer on a single bass sound to get it loud. So naturally, I stared using L2 on individual instruments to get em cranking. Then over the next few weeks, I started seeing videos of how the L2 ruined modern music. I guess it's a tool, and i try to use it delicately without making things sound squashed and poopy.
Because low-end in the deep subs eats up a lot of headroom even though it adds nothing to the sound of the drums. It's just junk frequency that puts extra strain on playback systems and makes mastering more difficult.
@@FrightboxRecording i've never had any headroom problems, nor my mastering engineer. all it does is shift the phase and weaken the transient. in fact that's one of the reasons so many people like the sound of tape, massive headbump at 50/60hz and down, leading to a shelf boost with a steep Q at 20hz at around 6-10db. and that's happening in multiple stages. if you send a 2bus mix through analog preamps (like maaany of my colleages are doing) you'll get exactly the same thing-boosts at sub 30hz. i was talking to joe barresi the other day and he was also saying how this is one of the reasons he likes tracking to tape so much. it's better in the analog domain but digital highpass filters make transient material sound so weird and disjointed with all the pre and postringing going on and the phase destruction of transients. if you really have too much sub information (wich is a sign of improper tracking most of the time) you're much better off with a bax or shelf.
►► Download your FREE 5 Step Guide To Better Heavy Mixes: frightboxrecordingacademy.com/5-step-guide/
"The plugin doesn't matter" - If people take nothing from this very informative video, take this. Stop spending $1000s of dollars on plugins, get good at the plugins you have, and acquire new ones individually as needs arise so you can master that plugin.
Great video, very informative. I was recording at London Bridge studio here in Seattle and I was talking with the owner (who was an intern in the early 90s) about some of the most important things he ever learned, and he told me that seeing how the producer/engineer handled Chris Cornell's voice. He said they had to keep stacking compressors on it in order to tame his insane dynamic range. But that idea of not putting all of the burden on a single compressor to fix every issue has really stuck with me.
Man I struggled with this for years by complicating things , if I had your videos and approach, It would have save me a tones of frustration and time . I really recommend all your courses to any new or medium level mixer , cheers Bobby 🍻
Very good video! Those that complain about squashing or ruining the mix doing this, completely overlook that you have to be subtle! Over-compression, saturation, limiting, and soft-clipping WILL ruin your mix. The trick is to not be lazy and throw all your processing on a bus and hope it works. Take the time to attack the transient tracks individually, fatten the non-transient tracks subtly, and remove resonances to increase loudness while maintaining clarity. If you’re unsure you’re doing it right, GET A REFERENCE TRACK to check yourself! Don’t marry the meters and live by what they say. After you balance your mix (without plugins), you can focus on taming the transient information, but make sure you listen to your before-and-after to make sure you’re not straying away from the balance you’ve created.
Gosh - was just driving home thinking ‘I need to tame my drums even more than I did the last time they were too mental’ so I can get some clarity and separation with the other instruments. And here is this awesome vid explaining how to do it! Thank you!
I don’t make heavy music like you do - but the lessons apply across multiple genres. Great stuff 👏👏👏
Bobby turning out free quality content like it's going out of fashion
I over compressed the drums and balanced them too loud. I used Addictive drums. Listened with cheap headphones. While hitting a limiter, my songs were still quite quiet. I think I used to hit -14 RMS while still sounding okay. Couldn't push it harder without sounding like crap. These days I use these steps (clipping being the greatest help) and it's definitely getting there. Now I just need to work on writing good songs that are worth mixing 😅.
Thanks again bobby for recalrifying things for us, you always seem to drop these videos just when i need thrm lately lol also if anyone id using FL studio, try using the fruity soft clipper on your drum buss to tame your transients, ive been doing this and it both tames my transient and makes my drums a little lower resonant :)
To be honest I've never really had this issue. I've always been conscious of high and low passing specific frequencies and keeping a good healthy gain staging throughout. And using a bit of mix buss compression small eq and sometimes a bit of saturation (subtle). And that's kind of it. I also love the magma BB tubes for that saturation on the mix bus. I know a lot of folks abuse that Oxford inflator and it will add bad harmonics at a point. Shadow hills for compression. Always works. That or ssl. Maybe some limiting (soft).. I don't even use tape saturation anymore for more modern stuff. I've also noticed those tape plug ins all sound wildly different. That kiive tape face is almost too much at a low setting. Ymmv. But I agree with all of this I am also not a pro mixer. I have a modest bedroom studio. But I've had tons of people asking me latley how it sounds so polished. Little small moves man. All adds up. Also number one rule. The source. That's most important and the player.
I learned to do this in your courses. Got a clipper (BSA) on the tracks that need it, to put a cap on and control peaks. Then Waves SSL buss comp, PSP Vintage Warmer and Waves L2 limiter.. Only difference is that i add just a tiny little touch of saturation (drive knob) with the Vintage Warmer.
Works everytime. Sometime even to nicely, as you can now crank it up quite loud before it start to get nasty...😂🤟
What I learned from you is to stop keep looking for many gimmicks to buy when I had all the resources in reaper itself and with one of your videos seeing that you achieve one of the best tone i heard whit simple plug-ins from reaper was the wow factor for me I'm talking about the reaper guitar template 🤘🤘🤘🤘🔥🔥🔥🔥
Very very helpful! Guilty as charged…I’ve been overdoing it.
you know what you preach, good video.
excellent video thanks
Clear and to the point amazing tutorial
Glad it helped!
cheers man,nice tips,thankyou for sharing,rock on champ.
Bobby, I'm curious - Why such low signal levels (-22dB Drums Submix for example)? Your SSL makeup is cranked to the max! Sounds good nevertheless, bro.
Im wondering the same thing..
i noticed the makeup gain knob cranked aswell. isnt that like "slamming it"
I would like to know about this too. My recording levels are -18 or slightly higher. I've tried recording with lower levels and then when I try to get to a good level on my master bus it just sounds smashed and like shit. What am I doing wrong?
If you hit a clipper or a limiter hard it’s gonna color you mix and the mix can fall apart. Good mastering engineers can fix this but a diy engineer can get frustrated by this. Indeed do a lot of little clipping, limiting and saturation each time you sum channels. When you sum channels new peaks can appear, by eating a little bit of the peaks trough out the signal chain the new peaks through summing don’t add up on the mix bus so the masterbus compressor only moves a little on the highest peaks of the track. This way the masterbus compressor stays transparent.
There’s a interesting production technique for mixing loud, it’s called clip to zero. I don’t know if can pull this technique off because I’m mixing hybrid, but I definitely want to try this method 😊 sum sum sum
nice
Hey, thanks for the video.
Can you show the whole Clipping transient thing on the drums a bit more? Maybe with a shootout of different plugins.
I've seen your drum Bus at -22 and and your SSL bus Comp pushing +15 db in the output. So it's also correct to mix at -7 and don't push the make up gain on the BusComp or am I wrong?
I would love to know the answer to this question as well. +15 db of make up gain on the comp and the Ozone Maximizer threshold set at -18db with only 2db of gain reduction. I'm doing it all wrong! lol
@@billyhughes9776 I Dont Think you are doing it wrong. my mixes are way hotter on the mixbus without using makeup gain. I had some Sessions to mix Through the Slate Academy and they are all way hotter. In the end i think the thing is, if it sounds good it is good.if you are not clipping and distroting the hell out of your tracks, everything will be fine.
@@larsmusicde I never clip the Mix Bus and don't use make up gain on my mix bus compression. Was just wondering curious as to his methods. I'm mostly satisfied with my mixes at this point. Thanks for the reply -- take care.
Sehr gut
Great video! To clarify, would you consider this mix mastered? Or is this what you'd send off to a mastering engineer?
This mix is mastered. I only use mastering engineers for vinyl pressing these days...I've had too many mastering engineers mess up my work.
What would happen if you did the steps, achieved a great mix and then slammed it through whatever?
Some bedroom producer guy put out a ton of super harsh clipped electronic music and recently surpassed Darude as the most streamed Finn
I am a beginner in mixing, I have tried cutting on sub frequencies but I am always hesitant to do so, coz I really like how heavy it makes the track sound, but I always struggle to get that right, my mix ends up muddy or ends up lacking any sub freq, specially between bass guitar and kick... can you suggest me some trick or could you make a video on that, it will be very very helpful
Kazro Kclip 3 on drum bus on default settins gives me about an extra 6Db of headroom
Hey man, what are your thoughts on phase issues when high passing drums? Thank you.
I never worry about it, it's a non-issue 99.9% of the time.
hi , ive watched you for a good while now and enjoy your videos alot , they are always very helpful . im trying desperately to mix my band and feel like im hitting a dead end , could i possibly send you a mix im working on to get some feedback , i would love for someone who works in this area to give me some pointers other than my friends just agreeing it sounds good just to please me
thanks
Beginner engineer here. How to you make a drum sub mix? do you just cut the sub frequencies and make them a separate track to mix them individually? Could an alternative be using a multiband compressor and compressing the lower frequencies on the drum bus?
You can filter on your kick instead if you're not bussing. A multiband compressor wont work in this case, you need to use a high-pass filter.
What was the LUFS? just curious
What band/song?
Mix the right way and the mix will be loud enough before even using any other plugin like saturation, limiter etc to make it louder. But is louder better? I brought out the Black Sabbath Demunizer album to the car. I hadn't listened to that album for years. Cranked it loud when driving and it was so pleasing to my ears. Then I took another CD, (can't remember which one or the band right now)and cranked the volume. Mixed and mastered a couple of years ago. So bad it sounded. It was a torture to listen to. Even at less loud volume it sounded bad.
Is louder better? It doesn't really matter as you have a volume control on virtually any device available today. While there are certainly standards which translate universally, and which might have changed overtime, it's up to the listener how loud they want any given musical piece playing. As you and as Bobby here state, the essential difference is between loud and hard, where the latter is simply intolerable unless you have enough earwax dampening so you are basically deaf.
While it may be subjective, I think this whole subject became an issue only after the 2000's. IE. radio sations or some other platform where individual songs compete plays between another where an algorithm decides what the consumer want's to hear. If something stands out from the bulk, it is instantly put aside from the competition. Which modern music is, a product to shill out some other product.
In short; it doesn't matter either way if the mix and the master are shit. This might come of as an elitist circlejerk but the same effect can be observed in movies and television. Luckily, no-one has to suffer it willingly except in extreme circumstances. I mean, many modern cars don't even have a CD-player. "A what? It's got Spotify and a share button".
Apologies, somewhat sidelined comment but I personally feel intolerable pain when great compositions suffer from this bullshit which suddenly became a standard without reason.
So should I be rolling off 30hz even on House and Trance Kick drums? How steep should the EQ cut be on that as well?
on bass-oriented music, try rolling off at 20Hz with 12dB/oct
@@lordberly ahhh thanks
literally just cracked a pineapple spindrift 2 min before the end of the video.
YES!!!!
How do you get a drum buss to sound like that at -21db?
Probably clipper
Haha oh man, I saw a Deadmau5 video of him using L2 Maximizer on a single bass sound to get it loud. So naturally, I stared using L2 on individual instruments to get em cranking. Then over the next few weeks, I started seeing videos of how the L2 ruined modern music. I guess it's a tool, and i try to use it delicately without making things sound squashed and poopy.
I agree with most things but that lowcut thingy i can never get my head around why anyone would do that....
Because low-end in the deep subs eats up a lot of headroom even though it adds nothing to the sound of the drums. It's just junk frequency that puts extra strain on playback systems and makes mastering more difficult.
@@FrightboxRecording i've never had any headroom problems, nor my mastering engineer. all it does is shift the phase and weaken the transient. in fact that's one of the reasons so many people like the sound of tape, massive headbump at 50/60hz and down, leading to a shelf boost with a steep Q at 20hz at around 6-10db. and that's happening in multiple stages. if you send a 2bus mix through analog preamps (like maaany of my colleages are doing) you'll get exactly the same thing-boosts at sub 30hz. i was talking to joe barresi the other day and he was also saying how this is one of the reasons he likes tracking to tape so much. it's better in the analog domain but digital highpass filters make transient material sound so weird and disjointed with all the pre and postringing going on and the phase destruction of transients. if you really have too much sub information (wich is a sign of improper tracking most of the time) you're much better off with a bax or shelf.
Hey man, can I send you my mixing and let me know how bad my mixes are?
Go in the description and click the first link underneath where it let's you get his free 5 step guide. Reply to that email and he'll listen to it
I don’t really care about loud mixes, I leave it to the mastering engineer.
Mine look pro but sound amateur! 😂
This is so confusing. You're using terms I dont even know what they mean. Also how to make mixes louder if you're not using a computer?
If I made that bet I’d loose all my money
😂
Yeah, DON'T USE ANY multiband processors on your mixbus folks
THIS DOES NOT APPLY TO RAP
This is specifically a metal channel. No offense, but no one here cares about rap.
Be quiet nobody cares about you or your opinion or what you care about@@scamp7887
No. It applies to actual music only. 😉
No it does not, I been an audio engineer for 18 years. @@wereallthinkingit9389
@@scamp7887cringe