So now that you know the broad overview of what we're going to be doing in terms of mixing workflow, we know all the tools and how they work. And finally, you know, all those different types of routing, we're ready to tackle our first mix. So here we go. Okay, we've started out with our forever begins to song. Like I said before, I've organized everything here in terms of color coding, putting everything together in electric drums over here then acoustic drums, then bass and guitars, I kind of in the same blue, all my keyboards in in yellow right here. My lead vocals in red and then something if I had a lighter red, I'd go there, but there's the close one is orange here.

So that is all of the tracks right here. Here they are in the track edit view. The first thing I'm gonna do is just trim up these drum pads right here. So at the very top, we have electronic drums. But there's really nothing going on in these drums right here. So here's what I'd like to do, I'd like to get to the beginning of this chorus.

And I'm just going to zoom all the way in and come across here. Here's where the drums come in. In fact, let me just mute the vocals, the lead vocals right here, so we have a listen. So it's really right at this spot that the drums come right in. So I'll just select the razor tool here. And I'll just drag down here to cut all of those first parts here.

Then I'm going to move along and this is where they end right about here. On do the same thing here. I see let me undo that. I'll do that just a little bit later. So in case there's any cymbal crashes over there, if there's a decay there, they can ring out. Then I go across here looks like there's a little bit of a hi hat there.

So I'll just get in just before that. And then we'll move along forward. Then we get in the bridge. And same thing probably come out about here. Looks up. There's a little bit of hi hat stuff going on here.

So come across here. And I'll slice about hip and slice about here. And then I think the drums go all the way out to the end. I sure do, and I'll just slice them right off here. Okay, so now that I've done all of that, then I can go In fact, I can zoom all the way out. And then I can just start selecting a bunch of these, I want to select all of these, ditch those, select all of those, select all of these, select just this, remember, there was a little bit of high hat stuff there.

So leave that higher stuff there. And then everything went out right to the end or select them. So that's this cleaned up the drums. Obviously, if you really want to get right into it, you could zoom right in and then you know, really adjust the top, I don't adjust the top very tight, I would not adjust the end very tight, especially if there's a release on some of those symbols and things like that. So that's done all of that. I'm trying to think what else you could do that with your vocals as well.

There's, there's no vocals right here. So if you like we could just zoom in on that. circles come in, they're out here. Same thing here. I should not be able to type down and do that. And maybe here.

That's about it. I'll zoom all the way out and we'll just trim out those particular parts of the lipo call. They're there. I think that's about it. Now obviously, you can get really, really into the nitty gritty. If you can't hear it in the mix, then I wouldn't worry about it.

But though sitting there was some things in here when Daniel was playing drums, he was kind of just hitting the rim shot on the on the quarter notes that I didn't really need to have in there. So that was actually taking out some of the parts there. So now we've got everything kind of trimmed up, we can start looking at the basic mix was bring up the levels and the pan of this song. Okay, so back in a mixer right here, let's just go through some of these channels here and decide what to do in terms of their basic panning and basic levels. So these two electric drums, they are stereo, they're fine the way the other kicks throughout the Middle snare strap, the middle of the hat I might put out here, the Tom's I'll put a little bit wider, maybe like nine o'clock and three o'clock overheads I normally put put them all the way out, left and right, the rooms down the middle, synth bass.

This is all good. All of these are stick with them. The lead vocal straight in the middle. Now these background vocals, the way I label them is that various parts and if they're doubled, then I'll put a, a, b or c on there. So this is a triple part right here. So you know, I'm not wanting to start pulling these a little bit further apart, that can be fine.

This is just a doubled part. So I'll put that maybe a little bit wider. This is a triple part. Put that maybe here there's no nothing really hard and fast here. It's just basically to get a nice span because without that all your vocals just coming straight up the middle and it sounds kind of pretty bland. Now when I noticed when I got to the chorus, these all these background vocals were very, very loud.

So let me just start by bringing them way down here. In fact, I think the left right bus was peeking every time. I kind of Listen to this so let's see what this sounds like. So all those drums that we chopped up before they're all gone now we just have electronic drums there and we'll tell you they're tired of looking back on yesterday that guitars right oh cuz some the future lots of good stuff on the way to new beginnings to brand new starts Get yourself a braver hearts okay so now we're not doing a bunch of peeking over here and those background vocals are not annoying me as much as they were before. Now let's concentrate just on the drums I'm not gonna worry about electronic drums right now. Then being MIDI drums, the drums within reason They're just really well processed, I really don't need to do much of anything there at all so I won't worry about them right now what I want to do want to do is to go to all of my acoustic drums and what I've done is set up the left locator to be right at the pass at the first chorus with the drums coming this should come in right about now my overheads out wide so there's a lot of bleed coming through the Tom's here.

There's a lot of work to be done within the drums here. So let's look at each drum individually. Okay, let's start off with the kick drum. I've got a section of the song is the first chorus that's looped around so this will just endlessly playback this soloed kick drum and we can start having a listen to it. Okay, so the first thing that I hear is the, the bleed from the snare drum and also the hi hat. So what would we do, we would look at that gate right here.

So let me play this. I'll turn the gate on and raise that threshold. So you can see that gate only opening up when the kick drum is being played here. Now, in this particular game, what you can do is adjust the actual range. So if you want a pure noise gate, where it's really opening and closing, it's actually technically only dropping it down to 40 db, which, you know, for the most part, that's pretty much using it as well. So let's have a listen to that.

Now, I don't know about you, but that has come I've taken off some of the Trent nice transit at the beginning of that, if you click on fast here, that will give you a fast attack. And that should restore that initial transit. Let's have listen. Turn it on. Okay, that's a little bit better there. I might want to open up the release there a little bit.

And that might be a little bit too drastic. So compare that to without the gate. A lot of that snare drums coming through. That's too much obviously. So that's good. I'm gonna put out a little spit a lot compression here.

Yeah, that ratio be be fine. Let me bring that threshold. So we're seeing a little, just a little bit Just a little bit of gain reduction right there. So now let's move on to EQ. Now the interesting thing on this on reasons mixer, you have a spectral window right here. So when you select that, now you have a view of exactly what's going on.

This looks like it's about where the fundamental of the kick drum, which is where I'd expect to be about 80 hertz, like that. And then you can see that that rolling down but you know what we have, we have energy all the way up to about five k here. And that's some of the, the smack of the beater and things like that. And this being kind of a pop song, I definitely want to make this more of a puppy, kick drum. I'll want to accentuate some of the fundamental right about here. There's probably some boxes around here probably around 500 hertz that I'd like like to scoop out and then I'd also like to boost up some of the That smack that beta.

So let's turn the EQ on. And then let's start fishing around. Well, the first thing I'll do is all boost up that fundamental and I'll bring that down to about where I think it is. That Bell is going to be a little bit too peaky. So let me just leave that on to a shelving so it'll, it'll boost everything below that point. Okay, so it'll be fine.

Let's look at the boxiness. And, like anytime I'm fishing for EQ, on narrow up the cue, all boost up, and then I'll start fishing for that frequency that I like. It's probably about there. So Once I've really accentuated the part that I like, then I'll pull that out a little bit. Now I'll add a little bit of that basis there and that's probably a little low. Let me move that up a bit.

There you go. It's probably a bit too much. Okay, so let's A B between the an EQ version and the EQ version, his roll off. Sounds kind of pretty flat. Okay, that's going to punch through really well. Let's move on to the snare drum.

So we'll go across here. We do the same thing. Put a gate on I'll make that fast as well. Good Okay, so I'm gonna boost a little bit of kind of the tub Enos of that snare or maybe that might even work out better or just restore those maybe I'll go in the low frequencies right, but I would like to put a low pass sorry a high pass filter on there. Do that too much. It's way too thin but a bad he would be bad right?

I just a little bit of bites here. Hello Listen to the snare bottom. Okay, so you can hear the snares right there on normally bring that down. I won't worry about getting that. Let me solo just that. Is there anything just high pass that a little bit.

So let's listen all this really good guy will do a lot of compression. So we're seeing just a little bit of a game reaction right there. Okay, we'll move on to the hi hat. Okay, so this one's a lot In fact, let me just deal with this one just by itself. Okay, one thing I've learned about hi hat is that it's when you solo it, it can be very, very harsh and you can sometimes chase your tail. Because it's just when you zero into it, it can just be the very harsh instrument to have a listen to.

So here's what to do. First going to bring it down a little bit here. And then we have that same section loop loop. What's the first thing you'd be going after? Do you know any, any symbol that has any anything good down to 80 hertz, hundred 60 hertz, you know that? Absolutely not.

So we definitely want a high pass filter that obviously not too much, we'll just bring that down until we have valuable stuff. And I would say I would say that'll be that there. I normally just add a little bit of Shane around. Let me turn that on. around maybe 1213 my dad now might want to add a little bit of compression right here. Probably fast just so that open a hi hat doesn't jump out as much as it has been before.

So let's hear this in context. A little bit more snap. Okay, for now I'm pretty happy with that. Let's move on to our times and overheads. So I've taken a portion of the song just one measure long here from 67 68 which has the two times is going to Doom down here, let's have a listen, just loop that around. I'm just going to deal with actually let me deal with them both at the same time.

We'll get both of them want to make them fast attack, so they open up quickly and the release is a little bit too short. So I'll just open them up. So compare that without gates. A lot of bleed. threshold was a little bit too high. Okay, so that's working out why now.

Same thing, I'd like to compress these a little bit. I'll make them fast attack. Just a little bit again redacted. They're now in terms of E queuing this let me just use the very first one here, Tom Tom one here. And I've had that right up the middle so that we can have a listen to this. First thing you definitely want to do is put the high pass filter to that to hide and all the guts has gone out of there.

You can see the fundamental of this is about 100 hertz. So that's where I'd like that to be. And I'd like to boost up a little bit. Let me turn on the EQ there. A little bit of that fundamental. Take a little bit of that boxiness out and add a little bit of stick noise there up a little bit higher.

Okay, so listen to EQ with no out Now on a lot of da W's, you'll be able to copy and paste, I mean, you could copy all of these across here because they'll be basically the same. This is a lower time, so I'd probably be going in terms of the high pass filter, I'd be going down a little bit lower than that. But we can certainly get a lot of that work done just by right clicking here. And what we want to do is copy the channel settings, just the, in fact, let's just Yeah, do the filters and EQ, and then go across here, and then we will paste, paste channel EQ, so all that has been done for you. Now let's have a listen to this one. We'll pan it right up the middle.

Okay, I could bring that down, but lower. Let's hear both of these. I'm happy with that we could certainly do some more stuff with transient designers in a moment, but that seems to be working pretty well. So listen to that in the context of the Yep, electronic drums. I don't need to do anything with these electronic drums but now I mean the drums are starting to come alive. Let's have a listen to just the overheads.

What's the first thing I want to do with those overheads? Yep, high pass filter them I might add a little bit of Shame on them. Let's hear all this in context. Right. Let's listen to the room. Now I can certainly add a lot of ambience artificially but just listen, let's listen to what the room sounds like.

Might scoop a little bit of that out a little top end. Let's hear that in context. That's quite dry, a little bit more of that room. So I'll dial that down a little bit and then once all the other instruments come in we can have a listen to how much of that ambience we want to dial in. Okay with all the drums that I brought up the synth bass right at the top, Holly synthesize, don't need to do a lot of processing with this, I might want to bring up the EQ and just bring up a little bit of that low end there and then he lower that down probably into the lows, so you can get a little bit more of that Southern now actually, this is doubled by a piano part here. This piano part basically Just has a left hand of a piano in this particular part, there's just doubles.

This synth bass gives it a little bit more punch. So that'll be fine. Let's move on to our guitars. Now in terms of the two guitars here, these were just direct recorded guitars. I don't know what it's like inside your da w but there's quite often there's a bunch of reamped sort of set up. So I've just brought up a couple of these soft tube ramps with system clean settings and a little bit of light compression here and also added just a little bit of echo if you government come across right here, and let's have a listen to how these guitars have come alive.

I should come in right about now. So you can hear this a little echo there. What was that that was like basically like a tape echo. And the great thing about tape echoes even those of the digital machine, it mimics the idea of a tape echo, which each generate a regeneration of that echo tend to get a little bit duller and they tend to sit in a mix a whole lot better Let's listen to this. So this is basically all of our rhythm section. Okay, starting to sound like a pop song.

Let's what's that working on our lead vocal Okay, so he's our lead vocal, we've got a spectral analyzer right here. First thing you do with a vocal what do you do? Get a high pass filter you bet it's gonna be a little bit too high I think a little bit lower than that. So we'll roll that down. So you can see it starting to kind of roll around at 80 hertz right there. Next thing I want to do is take out some of the boxing as probably I know my own voice so probably around on let me turn EQ on probably around 200 hertz is is typically we're kind of some boxing there's some my vocalizes are dropped that out about there.

Let me narrow that uphold more and less of listen. tired of looking back on yesterday, waiting around my way, okay to brand news, About Jana fits into battles Get yourself a braver heart. Okay, let's start with that again. Oh go back. tired of looking back. Listen to that day.

Why not focus some of you lost way to brand news da let's keep your chin up in the battles Get yourself a brave a hot again, tired of looking back on yesterday why not focus on the future lots of good stuff on the way. Okay, that'll be good for now I might just copy and paste that EQ across some of these other verticals as well. Okay pasted across to all of these verticals. I made change that because I mean some of these are soprano parts. I could probably ramp up that hypothetical to there, but for the most part, I think I'm okay. With the vocals upin the metal bit brought them down in levels.

In terms of the keyboards, all of these are synth modules inside the machine and they're all pretty much pre process, so I shouldn't have much worry that worry they're the next kind of stage will be adding some of these effects like early reflections and plate reverbs and delays and things like that. But for the most part we've kind of got a rough mix going on here. tired of looking back on yesterday? Why not focus on the future lots of good stuff on the way to new beginning to brand new starts Chin up in the battles Get yourself a brave haha Because vocals his settings down nice certainly the blend is not where I want that to be. So let's just play around with some of these background vocals. Okay here we have our vocals I have a section that's looped around I'm going to actually bring in the piano and the synth bass so we can have some kind of contextual clues in terms of pitch and everything and let's play this day begins to decay This seems nuts.

I'm just to say that day to day begins to tear apart gonna like to say talking together. Today is the worst part. Here we go. That's it sitting with the drums again. Okay, that'll do fine. That's what I would call a rough mix.

We'll start looking at if there's any things we need to fix on this and then also start adding some ambience along with all of these effects ends sends along here to play some in various environments like the plate the room an echo, and see if we can start bringing this to light but life but in terms of just a rough mix, I think we're a good way along to get in good rough mix. Now on this lead vocal right here, in reason itself, there's a little button down here called the rack and the paradigm or the way things reason. The way reasons does things in terms of its user interface, if you click on that, that will open up a rack and this kind of his analogy of hardware. And so this is the playback of this particular A track right here. And then you can actually drop insert effects right here on Pro Tools, we'll do another mix in Pro Tools.

And you're going to see how that happens. But within reason this is exactly how it goes. Then you just start go shopping through here. Now, within each of these verticals, I would like to put some pitch adjustment, which is the Neptune pitch adjuster. I'll drop it right there. And then also when I use this third party, compressor, it's a really nice compressor made by soft tube.

And we'll drop that right in there. Now let's solo that up. And we'll go to the beginning of where the vocal should be. Actually, it's not there. It's a little bit further back. So here's where our lead vocal comes in about here, and kind of comes out about here.

So we'll loop that around and go back to our rack. In fact, Oh, do it this way. Yeah, that way. MC berth and mixer and also what's going on here so let's have a listen. tired of looking back on yesterday, why not focus on the future lots of good stuff on the way to now correction speed. Let's mess around with that and hear what happens new beginnings to brand new stars.

Keep your chin up in the battles Get yourself a Braveheart obviously that's that's sounding quite kind of comedic. So the whole idea is that for a realistic sounding pitch correction, you'll just want to add just a little bit of a dab to this so let's have a listen that tired of looking back on yesterday. And then once we have that unsalted along with everything else, I think that should sound fine. And then in this compressor right here, there are some Yeah vocal light compression was it was a good one I remember that so listen listen to this why not focus on the future lots of good stuff on the way to new beginning so let's bypass that brand new starts Keep your chin up in the battles Get yourself a brave a hot look for the ones good with Miss round BJ why not focused on the future lots of good stuff on the way to New Beginnings like slowing that down so I can get a little bit more of the attacking that the transits my voice but this is a good start let's look at the levels to brand news da my bumped down a little bit Jane up in the bad let's get yourself a braver heart.

Okay let's listen to some context. Looking back on Yesterday, why not focused on the future lots of good stuff on the way to new beginning. Okay, that's starting to sit in the mix a little bit more. So, you know, basically all we've done is once we've got a rough mix up and running, we just add a little bit of light pitch correction and also some compression right there. And because I don't want to reinvent the wheel, I can then copy and paste these effects into all of the other vertical effects. We may change it later, but it'll give us a good start.

Okay, I've gone down and copied and pasted all that all the way down here. All I did was just went to the the first lead vocal here, and you go down here, copy channel settings, the insert effects, and then you just go to each of these ones here and then you paste those insert effects and I did that right across here. They're all set up. And now if I close some of these up Let's see how we're looking. tired of looking back on yesterday why not focused on the future lots of good stuff on the way to new beginning to brand new starts Jane up in the battles Get yourself a braver ha okay that's working out well we certainly need to start adding some ambience across here. But what we've done we've added some compression and some pitch correction on to vocals we've worked on our drums blended everything together.

Let's hear how the synth parts come in. See it's later on in the song where these really start coming in probably around here. Cool, we're getting there. Okay, I have a place a room echo and another delay down here. I want to set up a couple of parallel Compression buses over here. So here's what we do.

And this will depend on whatever we're here to tell you. I keep on saying it all the time, but unreasoned right here, you can go down into the rack. And if I open up the browser, here's what we can do here are all of the things that are on effects. And you can see the the plate, the room, the Echo, they all relate to these ones up here. So all you do, you just go shopping across here in your effects. There are a number of different compressors in here.

But there's a particular great one that if you just want to crash something, it's called the pole vaulting pole, pulverize it, and what I'm going to do is bring down a couple of instances of that on to the next to effect sense. So that's the basic pulverizer. And in fact, you know what I'm going to bring down here with that dirty doubling. In fact, let me put that above that. So that number four I'm sorry, ends up being Yes, six is the daily dabbler and the other one is the basic one. So here's what I want to do.

Let me just close both those up. Okay, so I want to take a lead vocal from the top and this dirty doubler here. I'm gonna send some of this out to this alternate all the way down and let's listen to look back on yesterday. Why not focus on the future? Lots of good stuff from the same thing. The other version of that gets yourself a breather.

Ha. begins today. Yeah, I'm just lucky guy gets to say listen to that. That's just let's brings up just really make sure a lot more for so let's get on the whys Keep your eyes on the prize better wise. Let me start adding some and I'm thinking we'll be okay because it all begins start from the top What I'm bringing back some of this ambience from the background vocals tired of looking back on yesterday why not focus some so you can hear there is a tail that echo there but when you bring it down fairly low it just thickens that up. You don't really hear those echoes in a mix future lots of good stuff on the way to new beginnings to brand new starts.

Chin up in the bad old Get yourself a braver ha Oh So push through. We're getting some A couple of things I like to do. If you've ever messed around with master buss compression, particularly the one that's modeled on this SSL console, it's really, really nice to just kind of glue everything together. So I've got that enabled there. I don't want to see a ton of this, I certainly don't want to see anything more than four DB here, probably two or three dB. So let's have a listen.

I can just adjust the threshold and we'll see if we can get a mix that we like. Way too much. On yesterday, why not focused on the future lots of good stuff on the way to new beginning. Cool. One other thing I'd like to do in my plate and room reverb. I typically like to, I actually have already done that take a little bit of that high frequency damping off there.

To just Get a little bit of clarity out of that simple lesson. And certainly now the thing I'm looking at right over here is the amount of pips here. So we'll have to go through and start buying all of these. Because the master buss, why not focus on the future, that's good. Let me just do that off camera and I'll be right back. Okay, I got a lot of these down here, I've just bumped down the master as well, just a tiny bit.

I'll also add some insert effects in terms of the click through on here, this various mastering effects and in fact, if I go to the rack, where is that the rack right here you can see there's a number, there's a compressor equalizer, a stereo imager and a maximize it. They're all bypassed right now. But what I really like about them, there's a bunch of different they're kind of like mastering effects that will go across the entire mix. Let's have a listen to them without and then we'll drop this bypass out here we go from the top. Drop it in tight. So you can see anything going on here a little bit of stereo imaging in the future lots of good stuff on the way to new beginning to brand new start up in battles, get yourself a braver, ha aware Tape.

So as a master effects, there is a little bit of limiting going on the the top end is being widened out a little bit, I might wide metal a bit more. And then pretty much the mixes done, we can start looking at some automation. Now I thought I was gonna do some automation, but I just listened back to this mix between takes, and you know, it's fine just the way it is, I don't think I need new automation there. What I did do is add a little bit of that pulverizer across my drums just to ground up those drums a little bit. But everything's sounding fine if I were to add some automations is how you do it and reason. You do it differently in various da W's will actually show you some automation in the Pro Tools thing.

But in terms of reason, all you do is just highlight a or actually hold down Option and then click what you would like to automate and you'll notice a couple of things have happened. We've gone down here we've recorded an hour I don't want to record on a track but I will record enable the parameter automation which is highlighted here because Because I option clicked on it now when you go to the top, hit, record and play. And now I can move this up and down, do whatever I like with it. That's what it was. And you can see that has been recorded right there if you'd like you can explode that out and you can see all those points, you can change those points, you can do all that kind of stuff here. But now if I were to go back to the top, and hit play, you'll see this guy will stop moving up and down.

And so you could do that with a whole bunch of them here. There's actually ways that you can send the output like if you wanted to, you could make up a new output bus but all these drums to group them together. And you could ride that if you like. There's a lots of things you could you could do with that, but let me just undo what I've done and let's hear a song from the top to the end. He's a finished song. tired of looking back on yesterday?

Why not focus on the future lots of good stuff from the way to new beginning to brand new starts. chain up in the bad old sketch yourself for braver, ha shown through a word came from the wise Keep your eyes upon the prize you Better Why's your eyes won't be okay cuz it all begins today. Life can get better. thing go way. Look when the law sets you back Until now when you feeling like crap. Just keep fighting back.

Keep fighting back. So there's a song One thing I didn't notice there was a little bit of clipping over here. So I might have brought down that limiter a little bit too. Take care of some of that. But that's pretty much the song that if you are a reason user, I'm going to include this in this complete file. And that way you can pull apart and you can reverse engineer all of the stuff I've done in here.

If you're not a reason user, I'm going to export all of these stems out. Both I think I'll probably do it pre fader and then also after after the channel so you can you can hear them completely flat and then you can also hear them affected. And so we'll have those all in the project files but there's after a song