Loudness is in the Mix, not the Master! -6.4 integrated LUFS with NO limiter!

Summary

In this detailed walkthrough, Baphometrix explains the art of achieving loud mixes without resorting to a limiter, demonstrating a mix set at -6.4 LUFS. The key lies in precise control of EQ, dynamic range, side chaining, and saturation. Through meticulous analysis and adjustments of individual elements like kick, snare, and bass lines, the video explores techniques such as side-chaining the sub to the kick, using spectral saturators, and applying strategic clipping at different mix stages. This approach ensures powerful loudness while keeping the mix clean and dynamic.

Highlights

• Achieving -6.4 LUFS without a limiter! 🎚️
• Importance of EQ and dynamic range control. 🎛️
• Side-chaining to merge kick and sub efficiently. 🤝
• Using spectral saturation to add energy without volume spikes. 💥
• The art of clipping sounds strategically. ✂️
• Organizing spectral space for different mix elements. 🌌
• Why mixing choices matter more than mastering tricks. 🎩

Key Takeaways

• Loudness comes from the mix, not mastering limiters! 🎛️
• EQ, dynamic range control, side chaining, and saturation are crucial. 🎶
• Keep the kick and sub glued together as one sound. 🔊
• Clipping can be a producer's best friend for dynamics control. ✂️
• Every element needs its own space in the spectral balance. 🌌
• Use oscilloscopes and spectral analyzers to understand your mix better. 📉
• Small compromises in solo tracks lead to better full mixes. 🤝

Overview

This video by Baphometrix provides a deep dive into mixing techniques designed to achieve loudness directly in the mix stage rather than relying on mastering limits to handle it. With a target of -6.4 LUFS, the video methodically breaks down how dynamic range, EQ, side chaining, and saturating each play critical roles.

A large focus is placed on the interaction between the kick and the sub, showing how they can be bonded into a cohesive sound using side-chaining and careful tuning to avoid phase cancellation. Spectral saturation is also highlighted as a method to boost sound presence without increasing peak volume, preserving dynamic range.

Clipping is explored as a powerful tool across different levels of the mix, ensuring individual sounds contribute cleanly to the whole while managing loudness efficiently. Ultimately, this video is a technical but accessible guide for producers eager to enhance their mixing prowess without relying solely on powerful mastering tools.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction to Mixing for Loudness This chapter introduces the concept of mixing for loudness, providing a crash course on the topic. It includes practical examples such as a mix being set at negative 6.4 LUFS without any mastering limiters. The elements involved in the mix include a kick, two stacked snares, a sub bass line, and a rolling baseline. The focus is on understanding how these elements contribute to achieving the desired loudness in a mix.
• 00:30 - 02:00: Importance of EQ and Side Chaining The chapter titled 'Importance of EQ and Side Chaining' focuses on the fundamental techniques in music production, emphasizing the use of EQ (equalization), controlling dynamic range, applying side chaining, and saturation to achieve a loud sound without the need for a mastering limiter. The chapter begins by examining the kick and sub as essential elements, demonstrating the process of isolating the kick by turning off other elements such as snares, rolling bass line, and even the sub initially to focus on optimizing the kick.
• 02:00 - 06:00: Deep Dive into Kick and Sub The chapter focuses on analyzing the frequency spectrum of a kick drum using a spectrum analyzer. The kick is revealed to have a full spectrum with essential energy at higher frequencies. The presenter isolates the kick by turning off the midline bass and then integrates the sub-bass to examine the combined effect.
• 06:00 - 10:00: Crossfading Techniques In this chapter titled 'Crossfading Techniques,' the main focus is on managing the sub range in a mix. The advice given is that either the sub or the kick should dominate the sub range, but not both simultaneously. However, an exception to this rule is if you can side chain both elements together effectively, creating a cohesive sound. This would allow for both the sub and kick to share the sub range in a harmonious way.
• 10:00 - 16:00: Aligning Kick and Snare The chapter titled 'Aligning Kick and Snare' discusses the technique of using side chaining to manage audio overlap. As highlighted, the chapter provides an example showing a kick hit where side chaining is applied to keep the sub (notated in purple) silent during most of the kick impact. There's a minor overlap, which in this context, is acceptable due to the kick being tuned to G# and synchronized with the sub's frequency.
• 16:00 - 25:00: Spectral Balance and EQ for Mid Bass The chapter discusses spectral balance and EQ for mid-bass, focusing on the interaction between a kick drum and a bassline. The key point is that the bassline is consistently hitting the same frequency around the kick, and the song is in the key of E. The kick is tuned a third above the root of the sub-bass, meaning adjustments are not needed.
• 25:00 - 35:00: Using Clipping and Saturation The chapter titled 'Using Clipping and Saturation' discusses techniques to handle phase cancellation issues, particularly between the kick drum and the sub-bass. It explains how to achieve cross-fading by utilizing a kick ducker, which is demonstrated through the example of adjusting the cross-fading curve to ensure the sub-bass is ducked accordingly.
• 35:00 - 60:00: Final Thoughts on Dynamic Range Control The chapter, titled "Final Thoughts on Dynamic Range Control," delves into the intricacies of dynamic range control and demonstrates a practical example. The instructor explains the importance of monitoring the summed value between signals, as this affects the overall output. A key observation is made by adjusting the ducking shape within the control setup. When the ducking shape is made too short, the impact on the signals is visually and audibly noticeable, underscoring the significance of precision in this aspect of audio engineering. This demonstration highlights a critical component of managing dynamic range effectively.

Loudness is in the Mix, not the Master! -6.4 integrated LUFS with NO limiter! Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 okay crash course for mixing for loudness [Music] all right this mix without any mastering limiters or anything setting negative 6.4 loves we have a kick two stacked snares we have a sub bass line and we have a rolling baseline
• 00:30 - 01:00 it's all about eq controlling dynamic range and side chaining and saturating that's it that's how you get this loud without even touching a mastering limiter all right let's look at the kick and sub first because that's the most important element here to start with i'm going to turn off the two snares turn off the rolling bass line i'll even turn off the sub at first and let's just look at the kick i'm going to get this out of the
• 01:00 - 01:30 way well now we'll switch over to spectrum analyzer [Music] so there's my kick and as you can see it's pretty full spectrum there's a lot going on up here too because that's important energy for a kick um let's see let's turn some things off here too [Music] let's turn off the midline base so this is now just showing the kick and the sub let's bring in the sub with the kick [Music]
• 01:30 - 02:00 all right so in this particular mix i talked to my advice about either the sub on the sub range or the kick should own the sub range but generally not both you can and should break that rule if you can side chain both of those elements together in a way that glues them together as one sound
• 02:00 - 02:30 and the way that i'm doing that here if you look closely if i zoom in on for example this kick hit here you can see that the side chaining is keeping the purple sub completely quiet while most of the kick hits and then there's just the tiniest bit of overlap right here which looks bad but it's not really because the kick is tuned to uh basically a g sharp and the sub
• 02:30 - 03:00 that hits at the same time as the kick here is basically an e so the kick is a third above the root of the sub and the sub is always hitting at the same frequency around the kick each time let's see let's turn off the kick this little bit that happens right with each kick is an e every time it's just a rolling bass line that's riffing off of e as its root note the song is in e okay so kick is tuned up a third that means i don't have to worry about
• 03:00 - 03:30 phase cancellation issues between where the kick and the sub cross fade into each other that's important now how am i achieving this cross fading let's go to the sub channel and let's um open up the kick ducker okay so here's my cross fading curve for the kick ducking out the sub this is the duck shape that's happening on the sub
• 03:30 - 04:00 now i want you to watch something here what i'm going to do is switch over to the summed value between these two things right so this is literally how the two signals are summing together watch what happens if i make this ducking shape too short
• 04:00 - 04:30 see how now the tail of the kick and the start of the sub that e note are summing above this white line on either side this white line is the zero db full scale mark you can see over here this is 0 negative 3 negative 6 negative 12. so if your side chain slice is too short this the tail from the kick remember that's my kick and the start of the sub
• 04:30 - 05:00 right and here they are together this area where they overlap is going to sum together and go above zero and you don't want that also even though the kick is tuned a third above and the phase interference shouldn't be too bad because they're not close together they're not tightly correlated it's still is going to create some phasing so if we look at the sum signal there's some
• 05:00 - 05:30 it's the phasing isn't really bad in this case right it's not significantly changing the wavelength and and suddenly attenuating the sub or attenuating the kicktail um it's just summing together pretty cleanly again because they're not the same pitch so you don't have to worry about phase issues if your kick is tuned higher than your sub or vice versa all right so again the whole trick here
• 05:30 - 06:00 is i want to get rid of this overlap but not so far that i start hearing a pumping or sucking of the sub coming in after the kick so we're just going to play with the shape and the distance to get the combined kick and again here's the overlay we're going right to here we want to get this combined area flat and close to the zero db line again just with our side chaining okay so look at the summed signal
• 06:00 - 06:30 let me let me just look at the whole uh the whole thing so we can see it happening so right about here that's the length of
• 06:30 - 07:00 the kick and then this shape here just controls like the feel of the crossfade between the two so watch what happens is i drag this to be a little more gentle
• 07:00 - 07:30 okay so a shape about like this isn't any different tone or creating any more or less of a gap between the sub coming in right after the kicktail starts to fade out so this shape lets us get the the shortest slice without making any weird gappiness and it's just the perfect shape for this particular combination of kick and sub and so now you can see the energy the rms
• 07:30 - 08:00 has been controlled and there's no clipping here if we zoom in although there's clipping on the kick but that's built into the kick itself i'll talk about that in a minute the point is the kick and the sub are glued together acting as one unit now let's look at what's happening in the spectrum for these two things so here's both of them together what i'm going to do is isolate the sub region so we're just hearing everything below about 75 hertz
• 08:00 - 08:30 [Music] now while i've got it in this mode it's much quieter turn up your volume so you can hear this clearly i won't talk too much over this part what i'm going to do is solo the sub solo the kick and then let you hear them both together and i want you to hear how the energy in the sub region is basically the same now when you see me come over here and turn this thing
• 08:30 - 09:00 this filter off so it's full spectrum again i'm about to start talking so turn your volume down so i don't blow your ears out okay so i'm going to turn this on and do a little bit of soloing back and forth and hear how the energy of the sub from the kick is just as loud as the energy of the sub from the sub itself [Music]
• 09:00 - 09:30 [Music] okay i'm talking talking soft now i'm coming up to normal volume again so that's just a sub region and again we can get away with this having the same
• 09:30 - 10:00 amount of energy down there because they're out of each other's way they're one sound kick blends right into the sub that's one sound so they can be equal loudness equal energy now if we go up to the base region we're going to hear that second third harmonic from the kick in the sub that the peak you see over here and again equal loudness they're both sharing the space and they can do that because they're side chained again
• 10:00 - 10:30 you may want to turn this up a little bit but when you see me turn this off turn them down so my voice doesn't blow you out [Music]
• 10:30 - 11:00 okay so same they're sharing the space but they're sharing the space because of arrangement through sidechaining if they are truly have to overlap for whatever reason then one of them should own that area and the other especially the subregion and the other one shouldn't it should be like high passed out or shelved out
• 11:00 - 11:30 so that one dominates they're not clashing clashing with each other now the other thing i want you to think about if you review that section of the video is that how should i put this you don't hear any other sounds down here below this base cut off right down here below about 300 250 300 hertz
• 11:30 - 12:00 you don't hear that high end um rolling bass line do you or this well the snare is not playing but the point is there's almost nothing happening down here except subby sounds and bassy sounds that you want to own the bass range well actually i'm lying a little bit i have to actually play those for you to hear that so let me leave this on let's go ahead and bring in oh this sub yeah so let's get the rolling bass line
• 12:00 - 12:30 in there and let's get the snare in there [Music] okay they're there barely the energy is really low from those additional higher frequency sounds so the point is you have to think about your spectral balance and what should live in each
• 12:30 - 13:00 region of the spectrum so kick and sub own everything from you know 250 300 hertz down if if you're hearing higher frequency sounds bleeding in down here you've got them too loud they're not eq'd right and we'll get to that in a minute okay so now let's talk about um the kick and the snare by themselves
• 13:00 - 13:30 turn off the sub turn off the rolling line the snares on again we're going to go full spectrum [Music] do you see how just the kick and the snare almost fill out the entire spectrum and you see a little bit of a dip right in here um this is really important if you want everything to if you want your kick and snare your
• 13:30 - 14:00 important beats to really cut through the mix and hold down the mix and glue down the mix as the anchor or framework got to fill out that spectrum and again notice that the kick alone is generating a whole lot of energy way up here [Music] that's the kick by itself this is the two snares by themselves oh come on [Music]
• 14:00 - 14:30 so here's the um the fat fundamental of the snare and then most of the snares high mids and highs up here [Music] so let's talk about how i've shaped the kick and the snare to fill out that spectrum and not step on each other [Music] here's the fundamental from the kick
• 14:30 - 15:00 here's the fundamental from the snare and then they're both contributing a lot of energy up here um so let's look at the kick itself actually not the kick itself the bus for the kick so i i've got them going into a bus and i do most of my processing on the sub buses um so the kick by itself is really boring this is the kick by itself let me turn off the snares
• 15:00 - 15:30 everything i want is there but it's all wrong i want to enhance certain frequencies in there and honestly as much as i kind of despise wa production and to some extent cashmere's pandering to wa production i have to admit this particular tool is a really good quick and dirty um kick
• 15:30 - 16:00 shaper so i do tend to use it um ignore this subpart it's kind of not right um i do this by ear um anyway so when we turn on cashmere essentials it's going to enhance the parts of the kick that i want to enhance listen to the difference [Music]
• 16:00 - 16:30 now granted it's um louder but it's basically the same timbre and i'm accentuating a few things about it just to make it stand in the mix better [Music] basically i'm accentuating the thump and the transient snap with with what i'm doing here in cashmere essentials it didn't have enough bite to cut through a mix
• 16:30 - 17:00 it didn't have enough bottom end weight to carry it's part of the combined kick sub thing so that's what these settings are about i'm not going to go into that you can figure out kicks yourself it's an endless journey um okay now then you'll notice as i apply the cashmere processing suddenly that kick is really peaky and super high transients and the sub portion of the tail of the kick is getting bigger let's just isolate to the kick itself
• 17:00 - 17:30 right here's without cashmere essentials the original kick just this dinky little kick right had the sound i wanted but not necessarily the shape i wanted so and not the rms or loudness so cashmere is pushing it up quite a bit right and you'll notice my goal was i didn't care about the transient because i'm going to clip this i wanted to get this subby tail
• 17:30 - 18:00 loud in terms of rms so i brought it close to the zero line and the rest of the transient of the kick is being shaped downward really quickly so it's only that very first of the first hit that's really peaking above zero and that's such a short look at this this is all super high frequency white noise transient and a clipper will make no difference at all on that it'll bring it under control but you won't hear it so let's look at you know one of these
• 18:00 - 18:30 kicks and let's turn on the saturator let you see what it's doing and how much gain reduction it's doing so that this is without the saturator [Music] and that's with the saturator which in this case it's a hard clipper i'm using a hard clipping shape i'm driving at an extra 1.5 db so we're getting a little bit of
• 18:30 - 19:00 clip even on this one this base tail this sub tail and down here too and right here and a tiny bit here but you know there's uh you don't hear that on a kick if it's not overdone right that's still a good basically sine wave even though it's a little squared off it's like has a clip shape so you can hear the difference if i just click this button on and off it'll be the same loudness so see can you tell any difference
• 19:00 - 19:30 that this clip is making to the actual timbre and weight of the kick here's with it on [Music] and that's with it off [Music] okay
• 19:30 - 20:00 no difference in in terms of sound clipping is fine even if you see physical clipping on the waveform that doesn't always mean it's a bad thing it may not be audible just depends on the type of sound it is and i talk about this in my clipping videos so the point is i added a little bit of boominess a lot more snap with this plug-in and then with this plug-in i brought it all under control again i made sure the entire thing was um under zero
• 20:00 - 20:30 and then probably the other important part to point out is the whole thing is only about uh 120 milliseconds long so that's at the tempo of this song that's short enough that it leaves room for the bass i'm not you know eating up all the space that needs to be taken up by the base or the sub in this case and so then when i bring in the sub everything glues together nicely
• 20:30 - 21:00 and because i'm clipping the kick nothing goes over zero and the sub is just a nice even consistent it's about um about four db five db quieter than the kick okay there's the kick at zero here's the
• 21:00 - 21:30 sub down here running along at about negative [Music] that that negative 9 db doesn't look right what's going on there oh because that's actually matching where the dot is this this this readout's a little confusing it's the readout where the green dot is um the actual line itself is this blue number over on the very far right see it says 1.77 1.49 so right now it's at about negative 4.75
• 21:30 - 22:00 negative 5 somewhere around there sub is about 5 db quieter than the peak of the kick after the kick's been clipped and in this song that's where the sub needs to sit because we're going to add a little sub energy back in the rolling bass line i'm letting a little bit of the same sub energy come from this sound too and so the total will sum up watch what happens when i add back in the rolling baseline let's turn that on and turn this on
• 22:00 - 22:30 see how all of a sudden now this portion where it was just sub before is now right up close to zero two in fact peaking over in a few places right that's because i'm letting some of the sub come from the rolling base and some of the sub the more defined part of the sub come from the sub they're in different parts of the spectrum they're not overlapping in the spectrum but in terms of energy the small amount from the rolling base
• 22:30 - 23:00 which you can see here see this small amount because i didn't i didn't i didn't high pass it away entirely i just low shelfed it away to drop its energy so that the sub was the more prominent part right this is the energy i want look how much higher the sub energy is compared to the same region for the rolling base
• 23:00 - 23:30 so even though the waveform gets higher most of these waveform peaks are coming from the mid-range of the rolling base and the sub is getting a little bit bigger but it's hard to show that here this is getting added or summed with this right so again it's a nuance if you understand how signals sum together you can guess what you need to go for but in my case
• 23:30 - 24:00 what i was really looking for was um i wanted the all right clear you out some layers um all right why are you still in there turn you off there we go because i knew there was going to be some energy to the subregion coming back from the rolling baseline
• 24:00 - 24:30 i purposely kept the sub itself a little lower than i usually would normally i want the sub to sit around here at around 3 db below my kick by the time it hits the mix bus right so the energy from the rolling baseline is adding maybe another this much to the sub line again this is just what you learned by looking at waveforms this is why i say use an oscilloscope play experiment isolate
• 24:30 - 25:00 solo immute test learn how signals sum together that's the key to mixing well especially mixing for loudness okay so let's move on to uh the snare now the snare is an interesting one uh let's solo the snare here so [Music] let's just turn off the subs for now
• 25:00 - 25:30 let's turn that off let's just look at the kick and the snare together okay so this is the nightmare mix from hell because you're never supposed to have the snare and the kick summing together in super loud genres unless you know what you're doing uh in this case i did this on purpose just to demonstrate a principle the kick is the orange the snare is the blue they're both equally loud so when they sum together let's turn off the sub let's make sure
• 25:30 - 26:00 the snare is back in here [Music] okay and it's two snares layered together to get the kind of bright shape i wanted so here they are layered together and this is what they look like when they sum together look at how far that summing overshoots zero it's overshooting by like 12 db maybe more just a huge amount right
• 26:00 - 26:30 and uh well 6 db if i if you look over on the right hand side so it's overshooting 0 by 6 db when they sum together that's a lot that's a lot for our limiter or clippers to handle but the nature of a snare sound is it's very bright it's high frequency and so you can clip a snare pretty aggressively and we already clipped the kick remember if i if i mute this two snares let me look at just the kick
• 26:30 - 27:00 [Music] well you can see the kick here um yeah mute stone effect because i'm tapping anyway long story short let me just turn off the snare so i don't confuse you right the kick has already been controlled on its own bus remember i have a i have a clipper here on the kick bus that's clipping this to zero so what's being added to this is the energy from the snare
• 27:00 - 27:30 which looks like this [Music] right that's being added to the kick because it's i'm clipping the snare too we'll talk about that in a minute but the fact that this is being added to a kick that's the same height means we get 6 db total of summing on top of that okay so what's going on with the snare again i'm
• 27:30 - 28:00 doing all my processing to the snares on the snare bus and tool is just being used to double check something you can ignore tool what really counts here is the saturator at the end so what i'm going to do is turn off all of the actual processing the tools neutral just ignore it i'm going to turn off spectre i'm going to turn off the transient shaper so here's the original snare [Music]
• 28:00 - 28:30 it has all the characteristics i want but it's very different sounding than what i finished with by the time i processed it which sounds like this [Music] so that's much brighter a lot more air a lot more super high energy high frequency and high meds in it um [Music] one more time [Music]
• 28:30 - 29:00 all right so what's going on with the snare the snare is a couple problems one of the big problems is it's too long this tail is i wanted that crisp white noise tail and i wanted this this big arena snare kind of sound but this lasts too long and there's too much energy here digging this is a this is a quarter note quarter note quarter note quarter note quarter note these segments
• 29:00 - 29:30 one two three four that's eating up way too much of the time in each quarter note i need to shorten this effectively and so the first thing i do is use a transient shaper to drop down the volume of this tail quite a bit so what i'm going to do is turn the transient shaper on and off with this button and listen to the difference
• 29:30 - 30:00 it's off right now and then i'll turn it on [Music] okay so transient shaping super important on your drums especially your snare because
• 30:00 - 30:30 snares are almost always too long you want a really sharp dorito shaped triangle because you're going to clip this and the more it's a downward slope on its on its original shape the less the clipping is going to hurt the sound and make obvious distortion and then the whole thing is much shorter this energy is still here but it's a lot lot quieter and so the whole effect is now it's a short snare but it has the same characteristic
• 30:30 - 31:00 and this means now i have all this room from here to here down that wrong button all this room from here to here that is available for the other sounds that need to happen during this quarter note before again what that with it off [Music] this is all going to compete and sum and mask the sounds that are happening in this almost an eighth note area right here
• 31:00 - 31:30 maybe even longer than an eighth note so we needed to cut this down make this whole thing shorter by using a transient shaper [Music] now i've got all this room from here to here from my other sounds they're not going to compete with each other and they're not going to sum with each other okay so transient shaping super important this is one of my favorite transient shapers the other one that's a little more complex is the new
• 31:30 - 32:00 um oh what's it called it's by waves factored quantum quantum is pretty cool but if you're just doing simple shaping like this this is the way to go kilohertz transient shapers great um okay so then the next thing that's happening is it's a little boring and if you look at the spectrum [Music] it's not bad but look at the look at how much the fundamental peak sits way higher than the rest of the
• 32:00 - 32:30 kind of high energy white noisy part of the snare [Music] see how much higher that peak is right there let's change that and we're going to change that without um eq we're going to use something called a spectral saturator and this tool is amazing it's called spectre and it looks like an eq but what it's really doing is it's splitting the signal into parallel keeping a dry signal running through one
• 32:30 - 33:00 channel and then the other signal it saturates the hell out of as in whatever region you drag up the blips right and so it's kind of like an eq but it's only additive and it adds from the bottom it adds saturation in these bands so look at the shape of the snare well the shape's not going to change but look at the spectrum now [Music] see how i added so much energy over here that now that the
• 33:00 - 33:30 height or energy of the high mids and highs is about the same height as the fundamental [Music] and there's a lot more snap in the real high end again if i turn this off look at the difference [Music]
• 33:30 - 34:00 so it's my favorite way to add energy if i were to have done this with eq this total rise in the the transient peak and everything would have been much larger saturation lets you get more rms without increasing the volume of the peak right it adds in from the bottom kind of like parallel
• 34:00 - 34:30 compression but it's better so you know i put these two things together and now i have this snare that sounds the way i want and has the loudness and energy i want but uh i need to clip it because it's way the hell over zero so let's see what the clipper does to that so here's the clipper i'm not adding any drive i'm just saying clip it hard clip it right at zero let's see what happens
• 34:30 - 35:00 [Music] okay and again because of side chaining it doesn't matter that this is a long portion like this and if you look at it it's it's not like flat topped laser beam it's super high frequency and this particular clipper uh keeps all the high frequency
• 35:00 - 35:30 information it's kind of a magic clipper um so it sounds great and it if i turn it on and off it sounds exactly the same whether it's on or off and it's clipping a huge 9.6 db that says 9.6 right here for the clip amount [Music]
• 35:30 - 36:00 can you hear any difference at all no snares can be really aggressively clipped and you want to you don't want that all that energy summing together at some higher level bus with other sounds okay so we've done eq'ing we've done saturating well we've done transient shaping saturating from the bottom which is kind of like eq and controlling its dynamic range with
• 36:00 - 36:30 clipping so now the kick and the snare when they work together will sound and look like this so this is the layers [Music] this is how the two s clipped kicks and clipped snare are summing together higher than zero so what we have to do is that the next bus up from the individual snare sub bus and the individual kick sub bus i have a
• 36:30 - 37:00 drum bus and on this drum bus there's only one thing happening which is another clipper this is the whole trick this is what everyone misses and what i try to teach you need to clip everywhere on a project clip at every bus every summing point clip clip again clip again clip again or use a limiter because a clipper is basically a dirty limiter you could use a cleaner limiter if you want to but especially for things like drum sounds it doesn't matter and this particular
• 37:00 - 37:30 clipper newfangled saturate is almost as clean as so many limiters because of the way it works it's a spectral clipper and it preserves all the high frequency detail and high mid detail even though it's clipping it's just amazing so watch what happens is i take this again this is a solid how far is it over zero another six db over zero right
• 37:30 - 38:00 i'm gonna clip 6 db off and you're not going to hear any difference okay and this is at the bus level the snare and the kick already clipped individually summing together again and now i'm going to clip them yet another 6 db here they are without the clipper [Music] oops something doesn't look right to me
• 38:00 - 38:30 oh oh oh oh because i'm showing you the individual kick and snare what we need to do now is just look at the listen bus so here they are not clipped i think i got this right i probably have to turn off a higher level clipper turn off my premaster clipper too so that doesn't interfere okay now you should just be seeing what i want you to see so here's a kick in the snare not clipped [Music]
• 38:30 - 39:00 okay kick sounds exactly the same what changes slightly
• 39:00 - 39:30 is the summed kick and snare hit now again this is the mix from hell you're never supposed to combine the kick and the snare too often and if you do don't combine them at full strength like i'm doing so there is a little bit of a difference the combined kick and snare hit loses a tiny bit of the snares snap and punch the kick sounds the same but the snare itself changes slightly from its unclipped version
• 39:30 - 40:00 so i am to some extent over clipping the snare to the point where it's no longer a transparent difference but it's a minor difference and in the context of the full mix when you have the sub and the baseline hammering right in after the snare it still sounds very very very punchy so you can't always win when you're going for loudness sometimes you have to make some small compromises but it's worth making those small compromises
• 40:00 - 40:30 in this case so one more time [Music] in isolation you hear that and go oh but my snare doesn't sound quite as snappy as before well bfd because by the time you add in the sub and the the all the other high frequency stuff going on during the drop because this is a busy drop which is bad
• 40:30 - 41:00 but again track from hell watch what happens [Music] does that snare sound anemic to you in the context of the full mix no don't let your brain fool you i mean think about these things but you have to be willing to accept a little some compromises
• 41:00 - 41:30 when you're really working in loud genres you can't make everything perfectly dynamic you have to make it dynamic enough so i need to control that combined kick and snare energy and i'm compromising the snare a little bit by adding that second stage of clipping up here on the full drum buss but overall in the context of the mix it still sounds plenty snappy [Music]
• 41:30 - 42:00 okay so you really have to shape your drums you really have to think about the relationship if you're kicking your sub you have to side chain things out of the way of the kick and the snare right and a spec paste special detail to your kick in your sub they should be glued together and sound like one thing one way or another now let's talk about the other thing i mentioned in my advice which is uh some
• 42:00 - 42:30 pretty heavy shaping on the uh mid-range bass sounds the lead sounds if you will so we're gonna go isolate i'm gonna turn off the kick snare and the subs we're going to turn on the midline bus which is where this rolling bass line feeds into a bus i call midline sounds and uh okay so here's the midline sound all by
• 42:30 - 43:00 itself now this is the original sound without any shaping on it no shaping no limiting [Music] now you're hearing the side chain that's this gap right here for the the kick and the snare
• 43:00 - 43:30 um oops sorry i should turn that off too here's the original sound my bad so it's a really cool sound it's very full spectrum it has a lot of sub in it by default um and it fills out the spectrum all the way out to you know roughly 10k or maybe 8k 9k 7k right and um
• 43:30 - 44:00 the problem is that's too broad you don't want your lead sounds your mid bases you don't want them digging into the region where the sub and the kick live and the thump of the snare you don't want them down there and you definitely don't want them competing with and contrasting with the high frequency sounds from your drums and the high frequency sounds from your drums are of course all the symbols the top sounds but also the snap and error from your
• 44:00 - 44:30 snare and even your kick remember my kick and snare have a lot of high end energy in them if i mute the um let's mute the sub and the rolling bass line so you can just see the kick in the snare again look i mean your drums have to own the entire spectrum that's how it works but they only own it for fractions of a you know 100 milliseconds at a time right and then other things need to live up
• 44:30 - 45:00 there too but you don't want them especially in the high end above about 7k where everything is just hiss that's where air is it's just hiss there's no tonal information above 7k if you have a tonal instrument like this rolling bass line which is playing your melody if you will you don't need any of it up above 7k so what's the first thing i do i turn on an eq
• 45:00 - 45:30 and just slide this out of the way for a minute and slide you a little bit out of the way uh look at where i've got this point here set it's a gentle 12 db low shelf a two pole low shelf and it's set up it's not filter number one the blue one it's set at seven kilohertz and so it's taking some information off the top now what i'm going to do is solo this channel
• 45:30 - 46:00 let's close you let's okay bass mute mute mute yeah let's just unmute these things and use solo on this instead so i'm just going to toggle this one filter on and off and see if you hear any difference at all that's fundamentally important okay so here's the original sound
• 46:00 - 46:30 unchanged do you hear any difference no of course you don't but look at how much energy we save up in the high frequencies above like you know roughly once you start hitting 10k there's a huge cut in the amount of frequency information
• 46:30 - 47:00 up here and this is you know most people can't even really hear this honestly and yet it's energy that if you combine it with the energy from your drum sounds makes way too much harshness up there and way too much transient energy for the limiter to react to or the clippers right so by pulling this away again you're making your clippers and limiters work less hard which means they
• 47:00 - 47:30 hurt the signal less and you don't need that information up there so i mean it's just i i almost never think about it anymore any kind of mid-range sound any kind of midline sound i'm usually rolling off at 7k with a gentle 12 db filter and then on the low end we've got this low cut now sometimes i have this set up as high as 250 hertz in this case i wanted i was finding the right mix of the low
• 47:30 - 48:00 fundamental bass from this rolling sound and wanted it to sum just a little bit with these the clean sine wave of the sub for a little bit of cohesive glue it wasn't creating rumble they're they're coherent and they're in phase so you know i dropped this a little lower than i usually do but the point is i've got another um low cut or i could have used a low shelf but in this case i prefer to low cut because i really wanted to clean up the rumble range down here
• 48:00 - 48:30 so again with it on and off do you hear any difference well you will but not in the context of the full max give me a second [Music] so it sounds a lot thinner of course when i apply this low cut but that's okay because we're going to sum it with the sub now let's bring the
• 48:30 - 49:00 sub in [Music] oh now you got way more low end than before let's turn this off bird this is annoying okay let's turn this low cut off and turn off the sub and hear it by [Music]
• 49:00 - 49:30 itself i mean there's a little sub there but not much let's turn on the sub 2 and engage this low cut [Music] now you have some thump now you have some weight now you have some movement in the bottom end you have a rhythm it's a counterpoint against that steady beat of the kick so you know put that in with the kick let's add that into the mix
• 49:30 - 50:00 [Music] now if we take out the sub and we try to make all the sub come from this rolling baseline alone it's going to be a lot more boring [Music] right where's the sub to counterpoint against the kick to provide a rhythm along with the kick
• 50:00 - 50:30 all the sub now is just the kick there's not enough in this sound [Music] let's add the sub back in cut this out so it's not competing with the sub [Music] and there you go basic basic mixing eq techniques you're gonna see curves that look like this
• 50:30 - 51:00 if you look at other producers who know what they're doing and mix well you're gonna see curves like this whenever they show eqs sitting on their uh mid bass sounds because you just don't need the bottom end you don't need the top end you need the mid-range and we can see this uh perhaps a little better if we look at the spectrum analyzer while we look at some of these things i'm going to yeah let's um
• 51:00 - 51:30 let's do this let's bring everything back and i'm just gonna solo the bass line for a minute i'm sorry not the yeah the rolling bass watch where this shape makes it sit in the overall spectrum there's the most important low fundamental which is it e because this song's in e and then
• 51:30 - 52:00 right through here in the mid range the low mid range up to about 800k is where all the important melodic information and resonant peaks are for the to help you hear the notes and hear the timbre of the notes right here and everything up here is kind of the crispy high-end air and we're rolling off most of the actual air here at 7k and above
• 52:00 - 52:30 so mostly the fundamentals a little bit of the crispy kind of presence right and we're letting the high end of the drums take over the rest of this area from you know about 3k 4k up and especially above 7k so now if we bring the drums back in i'm still going to keep the sub out of the picture for a minute [Music]
• 52:30 - 53:00 see how this area here only pops up when the snare hits [Music] and if there were high hats in this mix they'd be up here too right you this is where your mid bass sounds live right here right here this little section is your main area of concern and this is where they have to live and own drum zone up here
• 53:00 - 53:30 sub and kick own down here and to some extent maybe the snap of the snare would be right around here somewhere and uh that's your basic basic mic shape so mid basses all should have shapes kind of like this on them with an eq now when we add the sub back in the picture is complete [Music] and you could make an argument to even
• 53:30 - 54:00 add some saturation or eq here in this region to flatten this out to make the notes and movement and melody of the mid bass line a little more prominent you could make an argument for that that's a taste thing but in this case because it is a bass oriented song it's a bass heavy genre you it's common to see the pros will dip out this area of the
• 54:00 - 54:30 mid-range if we were to look at this in um there's another way to see that if we use tonal balance control which is a great another great tool let's get that up let you see it this way so here's tonal balance control on the same mix let's show you the broad look and of course it takes over my cursor [Music]
• 54:30 - 55:00 see how the low mids are a little bit depressed compared to the range that they've measured for base heavy genres sub is a little on the high end because i want it to be heavy it's base music right if we look at the fine-tuned view again you're gonna see a dip right around here [Music] all right let's get rid of you there we go [Music]
• 55:00 - 55:30 see if you if you if you don't understand base music you might think you need to get this part of the line up but if you if you analyze a lot of reference tracks and i can't do that because it's youtube if you analyze a lot of reference tracks you'll see that there's a dip here is really common because they want space here to really make the sub stand out and the high-end crispness stand out and and if there's vocals in the songs this
• 55:30 - 56:00 is where the real fundamental area of the vocals live so you want to leave a little scoop there for vocals anyway in most cases [Music] okay so those are those are tips now again no limiter there's nothing on the master bus look it's empty right the only thing that's really happening is there's one more clipper on my premaster
• 56:00 - 56:30 which um is turned off right now these none of these are active they're just completely deactivated so let's turn on the final clipper uh that's taking the summed signal of my kick snare uh sub and rolling bass this is what they look like when they're all let's see make sure these are all on yeah i really only want to look at the listen bus so [Music]
• 56:30 - 57:00 uh what's going on are you active yeah see i've got some things going over zero uh and then if i turn on this clipper right here which isn't doing that much you're gonna see these peaks right here come down these peaks right here come down that little peak right here might come down and so on [Music] and everything's under zero
• 57:00 - 57:30 and it's only doing well there's a few peaks that are actually as much as almost five db but they're short and again can you hear a difference when i turn this final clipper up where all the three signals are summing together on my pre-master can you hear a difference when i turn the clipper on and off [Music]
• 57:30 - 58:00 no i mean maybe the tiniest most subtle difference but nothing that significantly destroys the mix or makes it sound squashed right because i've done a lot of intelligent frequency slotting making everything live in its own part of the spectrum
• 58:00 - 58:30 i've done a lot of intelligent dynamic range control with saturation from the bottom clipping down from the top and i've done it in little bits and pieces all the way through the mix on different tracks and buses as they sum up towards the master so i get to this point and there's nothing for a limiter to do the song is already honestly too loud it doesn't even need to be under seven i could make this song seven and a half loves and be happy with it i could relax some of these limiters a little bit but i wanted to go
• 58:30 - 59:00 extreme just to show you can do this all in the mix and it'll sound great if i were to just not have done any of that dynamic range control and saturation from the bottom and instead fed a big hairy caterpillar signal into a single limiter at the end it would sound like hammered crap it would sound squashed because you can't overwork limiters you have to give them very little work to do that's why you put clippers everywhere they're like little dirty limiters
• 59:00 - 59:30 and if they're only clipping a little bit here and there in different strategic places it's clean the end result is clean it's much nicer than letting everything spike up and stack on top of each other and then you feed these huge 12 db over zero transients into a single limiter and try to shave 8 db off of it of gain reduction or 9 db of gain reduction and everything turns into mush because you can't clip what you especially can't limit that
• 59:30 - 60:00 much because limiters do a lot of other stuff other than clipping and they don't react well when you push them hard okay hope this helps experiment play my best advices use oscilloscopes and if you have windows in particular get sciscope because it's great you've seen how versatile it is as i demonstrate and show you things if you're on a mac sorry you don't make it for mac you have to find something else sorry or use the bit wig oscilloscope okay
• 60:00 - 60:30 hope this helps