Mixing with reference tracks. Why, how, mistakes to avoid, and some extra crispy
bonus tips sprinkled along the way. So with that said, show me the intro!
BOOM! What's shaking gang? Jeff Bastien here, and welcome to another Studio
Tuesday! Super excited to see you all here! And if it's your first time on the
channel, don't forget to Like and Subscribe, and all that stuff. With that
said, let's dive into it.
So using reference tracks when you're mixing is super important because, well
as the name implies, it gives you a reference. So you'd want to compare your
mix to a reference track for a number of reasons. Overall levels of individual
tracks, kicks, guitars, vocal levels. You can check the overall EQ of your track
to the overall EQ of the reference track. I'll show you how to do that later on.
You can use it to compare reverbs, delays. There's all sorts of stuff that using
reference tracks is really great for. Now first two bonus tips. You want to use a
reference track, or reference tracks, that are similar to the track that you're
mixing as possible. You don't want to be mixing a hard rock track and be comparing
it to a country track. You want to compare apples to apples, not apples to a
spare tire in an F-150. Second bonus tip. You have to take whatever reference
track you're using with a bit of a grain of salt. You're taking a track that's
still in the mixing stage and comparing it to a professionally mixed mastered
and finished track. So you have to kind of keep that in mind when you're using
reference tracks. And use it as a guide as a reference, not like a be-all end-all.
All right, so how do you go about getting a reference track into your actual
session? Well the first method is dead simple. I mean just import the audio file
or drag and drop it into the session. Boom. Done. But many of you out there
might be signed up for subscription services. Apple music or Spotify for
instance. So those songs might not be actually on your computer. And if they
are due, to DRM, Digital Rights Management, you might not even be able to bring them
into your session. You might drag it in and it just won't play. So how do we get
around that? Don't worry. I got your backs. Now we've got to download a piece of
software and do a little bit of setup to get this going on the Mac side of things.
But for all three of you PC users out there... I'm never gonna recommend to you
software, or whatnot, that I've never been able to use or test. So you can still get
something out of this next little portion. But how we're gonna do this is
Mac specific. Okay so first thing we're gonna need to do is download a Mac OS
extension called iShowU Audio Capture. It's free, so don't worry about
that. So you're gonna come to this page and I'll have a link in the description
below. Download and run the Installer. Okay the next thing we need to do is
open up Audio MIDI Setup on your Mac and we're gonna create a new aggregate
device. All right so here we are and you can see that I've already got mine set
up. So the way you do this is you come down, here click the little plus button,
and select "create new aggregate device". Now you're gonna get a list here of
everything that your computer has to offer. So very important, you want to
select your main device first, and then you want to select the iShowU Audio
Capture. And as you see here for your inputs, in my case, inputs 19 and 20, this
is the iShowU Audio Capture. All right, so now that we're done in there,
what you want to do is open up System Preferences and you want to go to the
sound panel, and under output you want to make sure that your output device is the
iShowU Audio Capture device. Now the reason you want to select this instead
of the aggregate device that we just created is because your entire system is
only gonna send out to the main left and right. Whereas when we created the device,
our aggregate device, iShowU Audio Capture is tracks 19 and 20 in my
specific case, so the computer will never send output two tracks 19 and 20. So
that's why in here we need to select iShowU Audio Capture. Now with that
done open up Logic, Pro Tools, whatever it is that you're using, and you want to
make sure that your input device is the new aggregate device that we created. You
can use your regular device for the audio output, that's not important. So
I've already got a reference feed set up here in Logic, as you can see it's using
inputs 19 and 20. And this is where my reference track will feed in through.
So if I hit play from iTunes, this is the audio feed that's coming from iTunes. All
right so with this set up we have some very important plugins that you're gonna
want to put, on and we want to tweak our output routing just a little bit. And
I'll show you why. So on the reference track we have a gain
plug-in, we have a channel EQ. So we open up the gain plug-in here, and the reason
that this is important is because, A: you want to keep your reference track at
the same level as the track that you're currently mixing. You don't want to have
the level of the track that you're mixing here and then your reference
track way up here, and every time you start to play you get blasted out of
your seat. And I know what some of you are thinking, "why don't I just use the
fader to turn the level up and down?" Ho-Ho-Ho, because on the gain
plug-in we can set the reference track to mono! So a lot of people start their
mixes off mixing in mono and then later on and start doing all the panning... and
my dog keeps clomping around upstairs... So if you're somebody who likes to start
your mixes in mono, this allows you to compare your reference track in mono as
well. Next important plugin is the Channel EQ. Now obviously we're not going
to be applying any EQ to the reference track, but you want to use an EQ that has
an analyzer built-in. So now when we play back the reference track we can see the
overall EQ of the song itself. And if you put the same EQ on your master buss when
you're listening back to your track you'll be able to have a visual
reference to see whether you have way too much low-end, or not enough low-end,
or too much high-end, not enough low-end... high-end... yeah... So here's another bonus
tip. A lot of people like to have compressors, eq's and such on their
master buss and they'll mix into them as they're mixing. But you don't want these
to affect your reference track because otherwise your reference track isn't a
reference track anymore because it's gonna be affected by whatever you have on your
master buss. So you can see here our reference track is just going to the
stereo buss, which is coming out over here. So what I
like to do is take all of my busses... you can see they're going out to buss 11,
which is right here, and basically you would use this as your master buss. That
way you can still mix into EQ's and compressors as you normally would, but
it's not going to affect your reference track. And this bus itself is still gonna
feed into the main output bus. So another super important thing if you're somebody
who has Waves NX, or the new Abbey Road Studio 3, or using Sonar Works for
your headphones if you happen to have if you happen to be mixing on headphones.
You'd want to put that plugin on the master buss, that way when it's on your
hearing the track that you're working on AND the reference track in the same
virtual space. Hahahaha... So now once you're done with your
mix you can either take all the effects that are on that temporary master bus
and drag them over to the normal master bus, or you can just leave them on the
temporary bus. I mean it doesn't matter, the effects are gonna be applied to your
track anyway. But always remember if you're using like, Waves NX or Sonar
Works, anything like that, just remember to turn those off before you bounce tracks out.
Now mistakes when you using reference tracks, they're kind of sprinkled all
over the video but I'll kind of recap them here for you. Again, remember the
reference track you want to make sure that it is a very similar track to the
one that you're working on. Take it with a grain of salt, because again you're
comparing a track that's still being mixed to a completely finalized, finished,
product. And always make sure that your reference track is the same relative
level as the track that you're working on. As your track it's louder you can
obviously bring up the level of the reference track. And there you have it!
That's how you use reference tracks and incorporate them into your mixing. Hope
you guys and girls learn something from this, and as always don't forget to "Like",
"Subscribe", ninja kick the bell.. Share it with your old Aunt Pearl. Leave me some
comments below. And that's it for me. I've been Jeff Bastien. I'll see you guys all next week!