Hey what’s up guys, David Glenn of davidglennrecording.com, mixingvocals.com and theproaudiofiles.com.
I’ve got a sweet one for you today where I’m gonna talk a little bit more about automation
and a ten minute creative spark that I allow myself here and there to do some kind of sound
design work, to throw in a bunch of plugins and just try to make something cool happen.
I’ve got a song called — I’m gonna butcher this song title — but Dame Tu Bendicion.
Forgive me the Encarnacion family, Victor and Sam.
They produced and wrote this one.
incredible song.
Loved mixing it.
I’ve got these files, knocked it out, and had a couple loops in it, and I wasn’t really
feeling the loops during the verse, and then in the chorus I felt like it was too much
going on so I took the creative freedom that they’ve allowed me and their mixing engineer
and kind of put my producer hat on for a minute and I got to work trying to make something
happen with these.
So I’m gonna walk you through, I’m gonna show you the before and after and how I helped
to make this work for this song.
So here in the track, the way it was given to me.
Back it up coming out of this intro and let’s hear the loop.
[mix + drum loop without processing]
Ok so for me that loop wasn’t cutting it.
I love Vic and he produces some amazing stuff, at that part, no slam to him at all, I love
the groove of the loop, I just felt like it needed some kind of — something to add to
the creative spark we’ll call it I have no idea.
Don’t know what I’m talking about here.
Let me bypass the automation.
Let me actually make the automation inactive and let’s pull in our good, friend iZotope
Alloy 2 has now become my — almost like a secret weapon.
This is absolutely blowing my mind.
I’ve started going in and using the presets and they have completely changed my workflow.
Whenever I’m in doubt I’m pulling up Alloy 2 and just dialing in, clicking through a
couple presets, picking one I like, touching it up a little bit and then moving the heck
on.
And it has sped me up I’d say a good 30% has been cut from my time to mix a song because
of this one plugin.
And I’m not really one to brag about one plugin, you know, that’s gonna save the
day, but Alloy 2 is doing an incredible job for my workflow right now.
So shoutout to the good people at iZotope.
If you haven’t tried this one, go do the demo.
The multiband transient designer is already worth the price of admission and the rest
of it is just incredible.
So yeah, moving on.
Let me take a look, there’s a preset in the vocal deal, I think it was actually, this
was, I thought it was a vocal one but this one is break loops smasher.
Cool.
And let’s take a listen to what that’s doing.
Just that.
Once again before.
I’m blabbing.
[drum loop before any plugins]
Cool.
Now with Alloy.
[drum loop with iZotope Alloy 2 multiband transient designer]
K, so a little compression, got a little more attack.
That’s not doing as much as I thought it was, but the Pixelator from JSt, Joey Sturges.
[drum loop + iZotope Alloy 2 + JST Pixelator]
Just getting a little but more dirt, a little crunch.
Sansamp.
[drum loop + iZotope Alloy 2 + JST Pixelator + Sansamp Amp Simulator]
Now for me, Sansamp, I love the texture I love the tone that it gives it but I lost
some of the clarity and some of the attack and I wanted this to be real choppy.
I wanted this to be articulate, almost like a punchy, choppy, just a cut in and out kind
of deal.
So I cut some of the lows out and I boosted a frequency that I liked.
[drum loop + FabFilter Pro-Q 2]
Without that.
Kinda sitting back.
So that brings it forward a little but more.
Brings it out.
And then I wanted some attack so put the good old Attacker on.
[drum loop + SPL Attacker]
Without it.
With it.
Very cool.
So you can hear that articulation that I want.
You get the transients are just smacking a little bit.
And let’s hear it before and after in the mix.
And then I did one last thing with some automation of a stereo delay.
Let’s hear it before.
[drum loop in the mix]
Very cool.
So for me it’s night and day.
I feel like that works so much better and then what I did to bring a little bit more
interest to the part to create a little bit more interest was throw some stereo delay.
I’ve got a delay set up called DG Delay 2, I’ve had this thing in my template for
forever.
Let’s pull down here and see if I can quickly find DG Delay, there it is right here and
you’ll see it simply the stock delay with an 8th note on the left, dotted 8th on the
right.
100% because it’s a send, got the feedback at 33 and 38, you can see those settings,
blah blah blah.
The saturation knob is pulling up a little bit of grit.
And then I’m EQ’ing a little bit and that was that.
I actually use that delay on the vocal or something else before I used it here but I
felt like it would fit so I wrote the automation in manually with the mouse and that’s what
we got here.
So let’s take a listen to what that’s doing in solo.
[drum loop in solo with stereo delay]
Very cool.
Now in the track, let’s see if we can hear that automation.
[full mix + drum loop with effects and automation]
Very cool.
So you can hear I exaggerated at the end again so you can really hear it come through.
But it’s matching the delays, the dotted, excuse me the dotted 8th delay from the guitar,
chuka chuka, and sound pretty cool, so get creative with it, set a timer, don’t forget,
10 minute rule is a pretty good way to live by when you’re doing effects and getting
crazy because it makes — it’s best when you have a deadline.
Knock that out.
Don’t spend too much time trying to get crazy with effects and do all this stuff.
If it’s working it’s working, if not, move on.
And I hope you dig that.
So david@davidglennrecording.com, mixingvocals.com,
theproaudiofiles.com and have a good one guys.