First important steps of mixing

Pro Production Masterclass | Logic Pro X | Julian Hinton (Stormzy, Rod Stewart, Seal, The RPO, Laura Welsh, Trevor Horn, Don Black...)

So  I’m gonna keep it, try and keep it quite on the simple side. There is so much  to do with mixing that we could talk about, but I’m gonna try and just keep it towards the basic principles that will mean that you’ve got an understanding of how to approach things, and then knowing that  you can take it forward in terms of your own investigation, because  people do degrees in mixing for goodness sake, you know, that’s people’s specific jobs.

so all the different types of compressors and all the different types of eq and exactly how to, how, how, how to create depths and and, and different styles of mixed techniques and all these kind of things would fill an entire  course multiple times over. So I,  I was, I was looking at these weeks and thinking, let’s put something together as I have done with everything else.

That’s just  brings you into that world. And then you can, if you decide that you wanna investigate specifically more about, you know, compression, for instance,  then it’s all there to be explored. Slightly different style for  this time, because I really enjoyed using  Keynote last night for the old masterclass. I thought I might use it a bit here now.

let’s pretend that we’ve worked together and we’ve created an arrangement inside of logic, which as you can see here, this is my session that I had or I’ve cleaned it up a bit.

so if we look down, I’ve got a lead vocal, I’ve got two backing vocals.

Now of course, you could multiply all of these and you could have many, many, many things, but it’s just nice to keep it quite simple to begin with.

 I’ve got a, what I call a sus sim, which is a suspended symbol, which is a  Very useful thing. This,  which is great, I showed you that was that company Waves Factory, where you can do symbol swells and it’s just a symbol, swells patch.

It’s called Suspended symbols by waves, factory runs inside Contact, very, very useful for transitions.  I’ve got an 8 0 8 base  going on, which sounds like this.  So it’s very, very simple, very suby, but it’s got the element of a kick there. And I find it just great for creating a sort of contemporary  bottom end to a ballad or anything, to be honest.

I’ve got my, main piano, or the only piano, which is my  favorite piano noir you’ll know about. I’ve got, spitfire audio strings going on. So this is chamber, chamber cello,  beautifully realistic.

Love it. Got some violins on the top, again, spit for audio chamber strings, cello, just at a different volume. It’s the same patch, but playing different, slight different.

The second half of the track I’ve called it,  I’ve got acoustic guitars  instead of a finger picking type part,  I’ve got an acoustic guitar, two  more of a strumming part.  I’ve got a fake acoustic guitar, which does wonders actually.  It’s very, very basic, but if I layer it, put it with the, the real one  does just work really nicely together to just add a bit more width and presence.

 And, that’s basically it.  I tried it. I tried messing around with some drums, actually earlier for you, but  didn’t really work, just really need it. So I kept things relatively simple. Now you could have lots and lots of strings. You could have lots and lots of keyboards.

you could have lots of different, you could have lots of different vocals as well, but the principle will still be the same. Now, what I’ve done is there’s a loose balance going on, but as you can see, if I bring up the mixer,  I’ve disabled all the plugins that I had going on.  Alright, they were all doing mix type things. Okay?  Oh, hang on a minute.

Let’s get into the fancy stuff. Got my, got my PowerPoint going on, haven’t I? here we go. Welcome to mixing one. Next one,  preparing your sessions for mixing. here we are preparing for bouncing out.  We’re, we’re doing that now. We’re taking off  clearing all the plugins, which are, ne accept those necessary to the sound of, which I haven’t really got any on here, but let’s say you’ve got a guitar sound and you put it through an amp and that’s the sound.

So leave that,  you know, or a pedalboard or something, leave that on. Or if there’s a reverb particularly, I don’t know, on something,  you know, then leave it on there because that’s part of the sound. ’cause otherwise the person coming to there mix it is not gonna know that. So they might not put any reverb on it. And you’ll be like, well, that’s supposed to have reverb on it. So keep things, if you’ve got a particular kind of compression or something going on, you are just like that, that is the sound of that, then by all means, leave it on.

but in this particular case, I haven’t got anything, I didn’t, wasn’t really doing anything like that.  So I have, disabled relative, all relative plugins. So the lead, my lead vocal, for instance, if I play it here And  that one day you’ll, you can hear.  So that is, a completely dry,  I have timed and tuned that vocal  and then bounced it out.

bounced it down. what else we got here? So just some contact sampler, plugin instruments, playing with the bass and the symbol, the piano. I  had some, some SHIs going on the strings. I’ve taken that off, taken off the guitar processing  and and taken off the BV processing I had on.

So I had various things like that. Okay. now the other thing you might want to do is consider removing automation.  So we touched on automation at the end of last season, and just remember, I should say this,  if you are watching this going, I all, this is going over the top of my head. I’ve no idea what he’s talking about. Automation, bouncing out all these things. remember I’ve covered all these in logic mass class season one, which you can watch on replays  on the TSA website.

So, and if you’re coming to logic afresh, I really, really, really recommend that you go all the way back to the beginning and just watch it chronologically and sort of follow along and do stuff that I’m doing, you know, because, as I say, I have tailored it, to you guys being creatives and coming to it as novices.

I did have lots of automation going on and the vocals and whatnot, but, I’ve taken it off.

And a and a way of doing that is as I just did there, you saw me flicking with it. You see the read here, if I turn the power button  on here, I mean, there’s no automation on that track. but there was on the strings, I dunno why I can’t see it. Why can’t we see it?  You see there, it’s turned green. One way of just of bouncing it out without automation is to turn the power button  off of the automation.  Okie-doke.

so considering removing automation is one thing because that, you know,  that will help, your mixer potentially  because he’s, he or she is gonna be sort of doing all that business all over again.  I’m gonna click on because we’re gonna do this. Oh, that’s right.  So  I had a bit of a glitch on the old keynote thing, but bounce from bar one is the thing I want to tell you about, which is  going to the top here to the timeline  and dragging all the way from the left all the way to the end  of the last waveform  on the session.

And probably a little and perhaps a little bit more zoom in right to the front just to make sure that your  cycle length  is not there or there or there, but it is bang on  number one first beat of bar one of your session. I explain why in a minute.

And then the end, you can see as you drag that down the pianos, that’s the longest,  longest thing. And then give it a little bit more. ’cause it might be a bit of reverb tail or something on the piano. so that’s the thing you’re going to do. Oops, and this is gonna essentially give you that as you’re now going to what we call bounce out. it’s gonna give you, the right length of audio file. So what we’re looking to do now  is we’re gonna create audio files of all this.

 Now then you might say, well, my mix has got logic.  Why can’t I just send them that? I’ll, I can zip up this session and I’ll send them that. Well,  what happens if they don’t have  certain plugins and certain, effects and instruments, et cetera, that you might be using? So we go back to here,  I’m using contact instruments.  I’m using a a couple of little fancy third party plugin reverbs.

 I could be using a lot more things. but they might not have, they might have contact, but they might have not have the same symbol library, they might not have the same bass sound, any of these things.  So what we want to do is to create an is to be nice and neat and organized. We’re going to bounce out every single part, clearly labeled, clearly put in a nice folder, ready for somebody to be, ready to, we come across as professional as possible to give to another professional and they can do their job.

 Alright? So the first, the first thing when we start to bounce is you would just want to consider whether we’re bouncing a, a mono or a stereo file. Now this isn’t hugely necessary, but I just thought  in terms of thoroughness, I might tell you about it because I’m constantly bouncing stereo files of mono instruments for my co-producer.  He’s looking over his metaphorical glasses at me.

So how do we do that? And what is it?  ….

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