Hey, what's up guys. David Glenn for davidglennrecording.com, mixingvocals.com, the new mixingacoustic.com,
and of course, theproaudiofiles.com.
Today, I'm going to dive in and show you a little bit of how I'm using iZotope Alloy
2 to save me a ton of time on mixing records. The preset library in iZotope Alloy 2 has
really helped me to knock off quite a bit of time on fumbling with sounds and sound
design type stuff. Their preset are great, and I'm going to show you how and why right
now.
I've selected a couple of upright pianos I've got. This is a song chosen by Jeris Cole,
it's featured in the Mixing Vocals and mixingacoustic.com tutorials. I'm going to show you a little
bit of how I quickly selected a couple of presets to help me keep moving forward in
the mixing stages of this record.
So, this is after as they're processed.
[keys play]
Now, without. And back in.
Okay, cool. A little bit of a volume difference there, but the breakdown of it looks something
like this. Let's take the organ.
I love this preset on organ. Listen to the A/B of that.
[organ plays]
Yeah, very cool, right?So, pulling that open, you'll see that this one's got quite a bit
to it. We've got an EQ removing, taking away the lows and boosting the junk out of the
highs. The exciter is like an EQ. Check out how dead this thing sounds without the exciter.
[organ plays without exciter, then with exciter]
And then, you can use the drive knob for the different settings.
Very nice, right?The dynamics we're just controlling a little bit. Knocking off some of the peaks,
and then the limiter we're just using for a last bit of gain staging and level. It doesn't
even look like anything's happening, so I'll have to bring that down a little.
[organ plays]
Yeah, listen to that.
So, hear that in the mix, we'll pull the drums back in. Let's bypass this organ, we'll pull
up the volume a little bit so we can hear that a little better.
[song plays]
Okay, so whenever I brought it back in, obviously it hit us in the face. It was too loud. But
then I dropped the volume down, and by thinning it out, cleaning it up, dirtying it up a little
bit in the mids and the highs, it allowed it to be okay lowering volume, and then now
it accented the mids and the treble for those little licks for it to be still an underlying
pad type feel, but the organs got the fingers moving a little bit, giving us some sweet
fills in there, and we hear that better now.
So then, we could even go up and see I automated it up at the B section of the chorus. Let's
hear that.
[song plays]
Yeah, so it just dies on us. It's completely gone. The clarity is pretty much non-existent
before that preset. Something I like to do is reverse engineer these presets, let's pull
open something else, what's another one... Probably the piano is a good example.
Let's take a look somewhere in here on the piano.
[piano plays]
This is before.
So that's pretty cool. I think I converted that to “EZ keys” from ToonTrack. I don't
mind that piano sound, I actually kind of like it by itself. If I was doing an acoustic
deal with a piano, acoustic guitar, and a vocal, I would more than likely not remove
all those lows like I have to blend this in the mix, but let's hear the iZotope preset
that I've pulled open. I'll go to the global here, and I've got “Poppy electric piano.”
So let's take a listen before and after of that.
[piano plays, before and after preset]
Yeah, man. So, I use the multi-band transient designer all the time. If you guys have been
watching the channel, you know I've been using that on all things; drums, bass, all kinds
of stuff for that. That's in my opinion, well worth the price of admission. Izotope prices
their things very well.
The exciter is probably my second reason to buy this plug-in. If you haven't already purchased
it, this thing is incredible. If you don't own UAD and you don't have the Studer or Slate's
tape machine or whatever it is, this might be what you're looking for. Even if you do
own those things, this kind of does something a little bit different than those. I like
the mix knob; you can mix it to taste, you can drive the crap out of it, and blend it
in parallel... All kinds of stuff you can do. You saw I was using it as an equalizer
almost by driving those certain frequencies against the tracks, so presets by iZotope
Alloy 2. Love what that's doing. Not going to bog down your time too much on the preset
stuff, but I felt like it was worth a video the good people over at iZotope deserved.
A shout out for that.
So yeah, more coming your way, tons of more videos. Mixingacoustic.com is the new course,
mixingvocals.com has been there, got a great response from both of those. Thank you for
all of the incredible support. Don't forget to check out theproaudiofiles.com.
If you're learning from these videos, please begin to share these in the groups, the forums,
e-mail your friends, whatever you can do to help us spread the word, we love you, we appreciate
it, and we can't wait to bring you more of these. We will catch you on the next ones.