Hey I'm Damien Lewis we're here at Dubway Studios in downtown Los Angeles
I'm a mixing engineer, recording engineer and producer, some of the people I've
worked with include Rihanna, Katy Perry, The Driver Era, Lennon Stella, The Wood Brothers
everything from pop to R&B to hip hop.
I brought a session from The Driver Era called Nobody Knows so let's check it
out I'll show you how I set up my session and how I use the iD44.
So throughout the course of any given week I find myself at all different studios over LA.
Often on pop music sessions I have a producer in the back of the room
who's working on a beat who is sending me a stereo input I'll also have a mic
in the booth I'll have an SM7 in the control room for references and we'll have a
guitar or bass ready to go in here so I really needed a four-channel
interface that provided all the i/o that I needed and sounded great
portable and quick to set up so the iD44 allows me to keep everything on
a dedicated input and everything's ready to go in Pro Tools at any given moment
I love having two D.Is on it because I can have my bass and guitar plugged in
and two headphone jacks
there's surprisingly not a lot of interfaces out there that have two headphone jacks
because you're typically making music with somebody else whether you're
collaborating with somebody or in my case when I'm mixing I really like to
have my Bose speaker set up on the second headphone jack that way whenever
I want to I can just flip it on real quick, reference a small speaker just
super handy to have on a dedicated set of outputs.
So let's take a look at my session, I'll show you how the iD44 integrates and we'll go from there.
So typically when I get a song to mix for the first time the first thing I do
is open up the session make sure everything's there make sure
everything's playing back and then organise, as you can see I colour-code
pretty much everything and it's the same session to session that way I always
know if I'm looking at something blue it's my programmed drums.
So I work from the top down meaning that this very top track is going to be my reference mix
that the artist provides me followed by the print track so everything is going
to end up here after all of its master processing and this is where I export my mix from.
Then I have my master faders this is the main master fader
my "all vocals" my "all instruments"
followed by the drums next
so in this case they have a live drum set and some program drums the live ones are all in red
and all the blue tracks are the programmed drums and percussion
then we have our bass in orange
all of our synths are in red
our guitars are green
our effects are this kind of purple pink color
and all of our lead vocals are pink
down at the bottom are all my effects returns
This darker green set are dedicated to the vocals that end up at the all vocal bus
and these lighter green ones are all instrument effects that end up at the all instrument bus
I just found over the years that I prefer to not have intermingling effects
if something is dedicated to the vocals I like it dedicated to that effect and I want
to process it as a group at the end.
So here you can see my drum tracks they're
all going to the live drums aux with a couple different types of plugins on here
all the stuff you see inactive are things that I just like to have on deck
ready to go I'm not necessarily using it but I like to have it there and
sometimes I'll switch through many different plugins through the course of
mixing till I have to settle on that sound
you also see that the programmed drums are feeding a corresponding bus
again several different options for plugins
in this case just a little bit of compression and EQ going on there.
Something I got into recently is using VCAs a lot so sometimes I don't like to
use redundant busses meaning that if I don't have a dedicated group of
instruments I'm trying to process with an aux but I want some control over that
typically with volume automation I'll just use a VCA so that really freed me
up to not use redundant aux tracks but still retain control over everything
and that way I can do small instrument rides over all my groups at the end very easily.
So when I get a song to mix the first thing I do is listen to the reference mix
and having multiple sets of outputs with the iD44 is really cool
because I can route their reference mix out analog 3 & 4
and my mix out 1 & 2
so if we switch over to the mixer and hit play
you can see we're getting both my mix on 1 & 2 and the artist reference mix on 3 & 4
so that way at any point during the song I want to switch over and hear what
they sent me just a single click there
keeps it really easy
So during the course of a mix I use a variety of software and plugins to process most of
the sounds but from time to time I do feel like I need something a little more
analog so having a dedicated set of outputs sent to a reamp box to use
guitar pedals or maybe a guitar amp in the control room is always really handy.
So in this case I want to do a little reamping to the bass
the stem that they sent me is already really good and it's got some growl on it
but I want to add just a little bit more cut to it I want to just go ahead and make things a
little nastier and then use that on a parallel track to blend into the original bass.
We could easily do that with plugins I do have all these great
pedals from Earthquaker that just do something a little bit different there's
something about having that tactile knob under your hand and there's something
about the pedals that just make me manipulate it in a way that I find unique.
First thing we'll do is I like to make a copy of my bass track usually
because I'm going to be blending in this effect with the original bass
so I'll make a copy in this case a mono one and then we're going to route it to output 3
on the back of the iD44 we're coming out of analog output 3 into our pedal chain
and returning into input number 1
now we're not going into the combo TRS / XLR input
we're actually using the return that way we're avoiding the mic pre
and going directly into the converter and avoiding any other circuitry
so we'll create a new track to print our bass back onto, I'll just name it "bass efx"
Our inputs already set to 1
I'm just going to go ahead and route this to my instrument buss as well so there's no delay
something you also want to note is you'll have to flip over to the iD44 mixer app
and make sure that output 3 & 4 is set to DAW Thru
now we can hit playback and go ahead and confirm that we're seeing this signal
so you'll see it hitting DAW 3 here in the mixer
then if we put this in input
there it is
now we can go ahead and dial the sound in
much better already
maybe a little bit of slapback
kinda cool sound
and then when we're ready we'll go ahead and print this back in.
So another really cool feature of the iD44 is the ScrollControl
by pushing the iD button here on the front of the interface it allows you to essentially
automate any parameter using the big knob on the front.
So in this particular song we have a big filter sweep that happens going into the last chorus
and you can do that with a mouse but I've found a far more elegant way to do that
is actually use the ScrollControl wheel to draw in your filter automation
so you'll go ahead and enable your automation for the filter and make sure
you turn automation into Touch or Write mode on the track that you want to automate
and then finally hover over the parameter that you want to automate so
we'll go ahead and start playback and then you'll see I'll use the
scroll wheel to draw in the filter automation as the section comes up
Just as simple as that.
So I've found that using the ScrollControl to enable
and automate parameters is just a far more organic way to
get some tactile feel on the control rather than just
poking around with the mouse and drawing automation points
I also like to do it on effects returns and sends sometimes for like a delay throw or a vocal throw.
So the way that we work has changed a great deal over the years where we used to be
tethered to the studio now we're constantly on the move I might be
working in a big studio one day, I might be in a hotel room the next day or I
might be simply in someone's house the day after that
so finding an interface like this that gives me all of the i/o options that I need
it's super easy to set up, it's fabulous sounding right out of the box
was a real game-changer for me
So I really hope you guys enjoyed watching this
I hope you picked up a few pointers along the way
and hope to see you around the studio.
you