Hey, what's up guys. Hope you're doing well today. David Glenn of davidglennrecording.com
and theproaudiofiles.com. I'm gonna show you a quick one today and this is something to
think about whenever you get to the hook of your song. You've heard me say before, I love
things to get bigger, deeper, wider, fuller, brighter, taller, fill in the blank — whatever
you want to call it. I like things to explode at the hook. When it's a appropriate for the
song. And in this case I have a song that it's very appropriate for things to explode
and this is a song El Nombre De Jesus by Redimi2 and it features Christine D'clario. A very
talented artist and I'm gonna show you a quick thing about how I set up my mix template.
I route things to in Pro Tools HD we call them VCA's, I'm using AUX's and I call them
VCA's, but I've got an All Vocals, All Drums, Percussion, Low End, All Music, High End,
and All Effects. Now if I've got stylistically a rock song I may have an All Guitars or whatever,
but they're gonna be further up if we look here, so like background vocals, I send all
the background vocals to a bus. Or the strings — I send all the strings to the bus. Well,
then they're getting bussed to the appropriate — call it a VCA. So strings is going to
All Music, you would come down here and the BGV's are going to All Vocals. The Lead would
go to All Vocals. But any effects like the vocal slap would go to All Effects. And so
on and so on.
One more more example. Acoustic guitars all music. Electric Guitars are going tot he All
Guitars but then that's going to All Music. You get the point. Kick, snare, toms — they
go to All Drums. Cymbals typically will go to a high end although I may send them to
All Drums, just depends on the song, the style, how I'm feeling like it's working out. But
more on that to come. I've got a sweet series coming up on how I use Pro Tools mix templates.
I'm gonna go into Logic and create a mix template. A couple of my friends have Cubase and some
other things so I'll be sure to include everybody as best as I can.
But, this is kind of the final stop, the hub, where this allows me to treat the drums with
independent compression to just the drums. Or in some cases the shells of the drums.
The low end I may do a little something different to the low end at the hook. And so this allows
me the opportunity to treat things one last time, All Music is typically gonna get the
Slate SSL emulation, the grey, the FG-Grey, some widening, etc etc.
Sometimes the high end will get high and low pass filters put to it and I'll automate them
or do something cool with that. Then it would obviously give me the option to automate drums
up as a whole, maybe some fills if I feel like I didn't — maybe there's some stuff
going on that I want to lift. Blah, blah, blah, i'm talking a lot.
What I want to tell you about in this tutorial is All Music, I've got an instance of Ozone's
Imager bypassed until things get to the hook. When we hit the hook you can see here this
is gonna come alive. It's gonna push up a little bit of width in the low-mids, the upper-mids
are gonna get a pretty decent boost, and the highs — in this I've got some synths — where
those highs get pushed up and out wide and it just becomes this beautiful hook we'll
say.
So, enough talking, let me hit play and I've got only the music, only the music in right
now. So you won't hear vocals, you won't hear the drums or anything because i really want
you to hear the difference in this by itself and then I'll unmute everything and you can
feel how it just kind of comes alive at the hook. So here we go. This is gonna be before
the hook and then it's gonna come in you'll see it turn on.
[music with iZotope Ozone 5 unbypassed via automation for the hook]
And now let me bypass it. And back in. Very cool.
So you can feel it gets all those things we talked about. It's pretty sweet sounding.
And let's bring everything back in just to try to get you to think outside of the box
a little bit when you get to your hooks. What's the saying: don't bore us get to the chorus.
We want to hear the hook we want to feel, that's what people are gonna remember. Let's
make that the biggest part. I will actually most of the time mix backwards. I'll start
at my big section. My hook, the vamp, whatever you want to call it. And mix that real big
and sweet so that I get this high point established early in mixing and then I'll go to the verses
and kind of let them build up to the explosion.
One more time with everything in let's hear the difference. Let's make it inactive and
hear it.
[music without automated Ozone Imager]
Yeah I don't even want to listen to that. So now let's put it back in and hopefully
it's better than what that was.
[music with Ozone Imager automation]
I'll bypass it. Very cool. So be thinking outside the box. When you get to the hook
try to get things to explode if that's the style of music you're working in, if it fits
that. Man I'm even doing this on acoustic tracks. Anything that I can do, small moves,
across the board at the hook. For singer-songwriter acoustic-y folk type stuff maybe dull things
out in the verse and then let them get a little bit brighter at the hook. Or let there be
maybe — it's kind of, I forget which episode of Pensado's Place it was — god, man, he
was from Texas and he mentioned how he'll have big drum reverbs in the verses but then
he'll close those down and make them tighter so that the drums come forward and they're
more in your face at the hook. So almost the opposite of what we sometimes think is at
the hooks e gotta have this big drum room. Make everything sound big and explode. But
if you think about it what that does is it pushes that back in the mix. So different
perspectives, I can see where both are — can apply and sound great. But just think about
what you can do at the hook to differentiate it from the verses. What you can do at the
bridge to differentiate it from the chorus and how you can keep things interesting and
always changing with subtle moves to bring excitement to the song — to give it some
life. So hopefully you guys are taking something from that. Feel free to hit me up at david[at]davidglennrecording.com
I've got some awesome stuff coming your way. I'm working on a tutorial series that hopefully
will be out really soon and you guys will be able to benefit from that. All kinds of
stuff with the template. How I start a mix from A to Z and how I approach it. All kinds
of good stuff. So if you like the sounds of these samples and the mixes that we're working
on in these tutorials then I think you're gonna love this coming up. So we'll talk to
you soon and have a great day.