Hey what’s up guys, David of davidglennrecording.com and theproaudiofiles.com.
Got a sweet one for you today.
The ‘Chosen’, you guys have heard if you’ve checked out the acoustic series that I did.
And if you’ve been to my website you know that I’m giving that away for free.
If you go to davidglennrecording.com and you subscribe, you’re gonna get ‘Thread’
which is a piano, vocal and a room mic.
And then if you mix thread and send me a link, SoundCloud link or an mp3 to my email (david@davidglennrecording.com),
then I’m gonna reply to your email with the files for this song.
This is called chosen.
And it’s got drums, bass, keys, guitars, the whole works.
Great, great song.
And today we’re gonna cover a couple things with it.
So I got to finally get around to mixing it myself, have all these great submissions coming
in from other people mixing it, but I’m finally getting to sit down and mix it.
And last night I was sitting with Jeris, the artist, and we were going over the guitar
tones.
And so my buddy in Chicago, his name is Victor Encarnacion killed it.
He’s a beast, love his work, he’s a producer.
Most of the stuff you’ve heard me do in my tutorials either produced or co-produced
by Vic.
And he’s just killing it up there.
And the guitar tones he sent me, I really like them, but he processed them with — he
committed to the sound which is great, but he processed them with his reverbs and delays.
And for me, the delays and the reverbs trailed out too much, and they kind of covered up
the tone.
So what I want to do is show you how I took his dry guitars and processed them with my
own.
I’m a guitar player so you guys who play guitar you’ll know how we are about our
tones.
I kind of created a tone of my own, and then blended it with what he gave me.
Check for phase and we’re gonna go over that.
So let me shut up and hit play so you guys can hear what we’re gonna be working with
and this is just — I’ve barely started this mix so don’t judge me on the mix, but
we’re gonna talk about the guitars.
[song]
Very cool.
So I love the part, it’s absolutely insane.
I love, this is a finished result of where I’m at now pre-mixing.
And I’m gonna kinda walk you through, like I said Vic is a beast, he uses Guitar Rig,
I think it’s called, it’s a Native Instruments Guitar Rig 2.
I’m not familiar.
I have an eleven rack.
I’ve got Waves Guitar.
I love the free plugins the eleven free is great the Sansamp is awesome.
But in this case he used that and I’m gonna solo it for you and show you pretty much I
have a little tiny EQ just cutting out some lows.
But let’s listen to just the processed guitar from Vic.
[electric guitar with printed reverb and delay effects]
Cool, so great part.
I don’t mind the tone, I like it.
But being the OCD producer/guitar player that I am.
I wanted to get in and have a little more control.
So let’s show you what I’m thinking here.
Now, one of my favorite guitar pedals of all time is the Voodoo Labs Sparkle Drive.
And what it does is the Sparkle Drive, I’ll pull up that so you can see it, but it’s
the, it’s an emulation of like a clean amp and running a driven amp at the same time.
So it gives you the impression of the clean and the drive and you can control the blend
between them and then obviously drive and level, but what I love about that is when
I’ve tracked guitars I’ve always thought about the sparkle drive, about that pedal.
Because when you track with clean tones, you seem to get the transient, you get more of
the note in my opinion.
You get this nice attack from the clean of your guitar, from smacking the strings.
And I love that about it.
But that’s not enough for me, so what I do is I double the part with a drive tone.
And so I’ll get either just even if it’s just a little bit dirtier or if it’s slammed
with distortion or overdrive, whatever it is.
Tube Screamer tone.
I love the blend that that gives me.
So when I’m producing guitars, I often will duplicate and either come up with a different
amp tone and blend them or if I’ve got the Sparkle Drive which I don’t at this point,
the beautiful thing about pedals and us guitar players, we sell and trade and do all that,
but anyways, I’m blabbing.
But that’s what I’m thinking about whenever I produce this guitar tone right here.
So let me solo and pull open the other beautiful thing was not really a review of the UAD guitar
amps but the Chandler amp blew me away.
This and the other one, I can’t remember the name of it, but it was just funneling
through some presets, I found this one it’s called tele clean, kind of fit the vibe I
was going for and let’s take a listen.
[electric guitar + UAD Chandler Amp Plugin]
Yeah, so it’s got a nice tight sound to it.
Not too driven and then let’s pull up this guy.
This is the one that I’ve driven a little bit harder and that’s again the chandler.
It’s another preset, it’s called Paula Lead and I think it just turned off the delay,
but let’s take a listen.
[electric guitar + UAD Chandler Amp Plugin with different preset]
Yeah, so that’s got more of the character and the tone of the sound.
And now let’s play them together.
I’m gonna pull this one down and we’ll blend it up.
[electric guitar solo clean and overdrive blend]
Now I’ll mute the drive solo.
Aw man.
Back in.
Now I’m gonna mute the clean.
Yeah so either way you’re missing something.
So the beauty of that, I love the blend.
And when I put it in the mix, let’s mute Vic’s solo.
Listen to that in the mix.
It sounds good.
[guitar solo in the mix]
Cool, so it sounds good.
A little volume automation maybe whenever I get to the mixing of it to kind of pull
up some of the softer stuff.
I have control now of the clean and the drive, so maybe the unison bend I could pull down
the drive a little bit, or up, whatever I end up doing to taste.
And have some sweet options there.
But what I did was just because I like options sometimes, I pulled open Vic’s solo guitar.
The original with the processed sounds, and I pulled that in.
So let’s pull it down.
And then we’ll blend that in to taste.
[guitar solo blend of original, clean and overdrive signals]
Cool.
Now it may be pretty subtle there but listen whenever I mute it.
[guitar with/without original processed solo]
And then I’ll put it back in.
And back out.
Yeah so it may seem like a lot, you’ve got three tones, they’re the same part, but
three tones contributing to the overall sound and in my opinion I think it sounds great
with all three of them, and I wouldn’t have expected that to.
Now, sometimes what I want to note is whenever you’re messing with these different amp
tones you may come across the phase issue, they may not play nicely together.
So it’s as simple as pulling open, in this case I got lucky they did, but while I was
experimenting there were a couple of tones that didn’t play nice together.
But if you just pull open an EQ or some way to flip the phase depending upon what DAW
you’re in.
Us Pro Tools guys gotta pull something up separate, you go ahead and pull that up, you
can solo those tones.
Mute that guy for a second.
And then just flip the phase.
Yeah, and you hear how everything just kind of disappears, it gets real kind of tinny
and thin.
That’s how you know it’s out of phase.
So by flipping the phase we actually put it out phase so let’s pull it back in.
[guitar solo with/without phase flip]
And then with the other solo.
Cool.
Man, so the Sparkle Drive effect I’m calling it, the clean and a driven tone and then we
even had that other one for character so I’m not even gonna be going too much to any verb
or delay because it’s already in the printed track.
And that’s what I wanted this video to be about, was the Sparkle Drive.
So clean and driven equals beautiful.
Hope you guys love that one.
Don’t forget to check out davidglennrecording.com for free session files and of course The Pro
Audio Files for some awesome content.