Greetings, my name is Ian Vargo and I'm with theproaudiofiles.com and today I'm gonna be
showing you how to produce and mix a rock song from — literally from scratch.
So what I was given — this particular song is Ray Gun by Ugly Ugly Words, make sure to
check it out on iTunes.
What I was provided in this case I was given a scratch vocal track and a scratch direct
guitar track.
And let's take a listen to the guitar.
[scratch guitar]
And in fact let me turn off these plugins to show you what it sounds like direct.
[DI guitar]
Ok, we've got this vocal track right here.
I'm gonna turn off any plugins and mute all the sends.
It's a great performance.
Sounds like Motörhead Ace of Spades.
[vocal scratch track]
Add the guitar there.
And so that's what I was given originally.
And it was sort of my vision to take it and make it much fuller and sound more like that
Motörhead head song Ace of Spades.
Gotta check that one out if you're into rock and roll.
Ok, so I'm gonna turn these plugins back on.
And so what I started with was those tracks right there and then next I added drums.
And I actually programmed all the drums.
Now they're programmed to sound real.
I guess at that time I couldn't afford a drummer, didn't have a drum set.
Didn't have a studio on that particular day I was working on this track.
So I actually created the drum performance using a combination of VSTs on this instrument
track.
I'm not gonna actually load Reason.
But you can see that this is actually my performance.
Kick snare, kick snare.
And we've got a bunch of hi-hats and simple — excuse me here let's close Reason.
And so we have a performance here.
Let's see if we can load a virtual instrument like BFD2 which is a great one that I own.
Let's load a drum kit.
Let's see what it sounds like.
This comes in hot generally.
[BFD 2 programmed drums]
So that's me playing drums on a MIDI keyboard.
Ok, and what I would do is get individuals sounds that I would like, let's go for a more
direct sound, and I would print multiple layers of kick and snare until I was happy with the
sound, so we've got a kick drum right here.
[kick drum]
It's more of a direct sound.
Sort of a roomy snare.
Straight forward snare.
Overheads.
That's my cat.
Oh, running out memory, awesome.
Let's get rid of you BFD.
We've got hi-hats, room, cymbals, direct — let's just get all of these drums going you can
hear what the final sort of print sounds like.
And the reason I do this is because I want to be able to — even though they are created
from virtual instruments — I want to be able to have control and be able to mix them
like I would a natural drum set.
So this is what they sound like after printed.
[BFD 2 drums]
Ok, and so fortunately the tempo was 204 and this original guitar track and vocal was tracked
to a click.
So already it sounds a little better.
And these guitars in.
I actually recorded the bass next.
We have the bass which was direct.
I'm gonna mute all of these plugins here on this bass.
And I wanted sort of a grainy aggressive picky bass sound.
So here's the original bass sound.
[bass guitar]
Ok so we sorta have that cool, very picky sound going on.
Good for rock music.
Let's add in these drums here.
And does not quite cut through.
And especially once we add the guitars later you're gonna hear the bass definitely was
not able to cut through with the current setting.
So what I did was I added some harmonic distortion with the decapitator.
I'm not really gonna go through these settings.
That's for another tutorial.
We've got some EQ, some drastic boost at 3k to bring out the pickiness.
More EQ, drastic cut at 4k.
Don't always know why I do these things but here we go.
We've got the CLA-76 compressor.
More EQ, some multiband compression and limiting.
Limiting on bass is something I do every so often.
So let's hear it now.
[bass guitar with EQ and compression]
Cuts through way better.
Next step was the guitars, ok.
So let's solo this guitar right here, change our output.
[guitars]
I actually recorded these guitars direct, not very rock and roll.
Whatever.
So this is the original sound, you're gonna hear some clipping because I'm a bad engineer.
And what I was really going for is a loud crunchy aggressive in your face sound, so
what I did is I started with some compression, added this SansAmp plugin.
I apologize if I'm going through these really quickly.
Decapitator.
And some more compression and the resulting sound was this.
[guitar + compression + SansAmp + Decapitator]
And then what I did to save, you know, computing, was just printed directly onto an audio track
from this track, so.
Let's change this to no output and the final sound is this right here.
Sounds like I did a little more distortion, maybe some decapitator there.
And the other guitar.
Add in the bass.
Get those drums going.
Bring in the lead vocal.
We're getting there.
A big part of this song I know we wanted to have a blistering guitar solo so let's go
forward a little bit.
Ok and so I did the same technique where I have sort of a direct sound, let's find that.
It's gonna sound pretty funny.
Lead guitar direct.
[lead guitar solo]
Sort of just a crazy distorted broken sounding guitar.
Sounds like we have some cowbell also created with BFD 2.
And thrown in for good measure, I was able to capture the sound of — my cat makes this
weird sound, you heard him he made a cameo before — makes this weird sound before he
throws up.
He was actually about to throw up while I was working on the song, so you can hear you
got the click track in there, you know, at 204 BPM.
So I sunk that up and looped it, and I think, you know, the cat throwing up sound is really
what made it all what it is.
So anyway, I hope you had a good time here.
I know I had a great time producing and mixing this track.
It's Ray Gun by Ugly, Ugly Words.
Make sure to check it out.
If you have any questions, my name is Ian Vargo, contact me ianvargo[at]gmail[dot]com
and make sure to follow The Pro Audio Files.
Thank you.