So in this section, we're going to take all of the tools of the trade that we learned in the using a mixer Section A little while ago, and mix at Main mix and also our monitors because we've learned what all these tools are. I'm going to be going through this fairly quickly. And if you need a refresher then just go back to the using a mixer section. Now I'm going to be using this PreSonus 24 dot four digital board. Certainly not the, you know, the latest ball around, but I feel that this particular board will be really a good one to learn on. As any digital console out there is very similar and all the effects that I want to show you the built right in right here also has a really cool application that you can run, which records every single input into your computer.

In fact, that's how I'm going to be mixing instead of me setting up in a live venue. You won't really be able to hear me and it's hard to have the band go over and over your pattern over and again. Again, for our demonstration purposes, I'll be using a recording of a live performance where every instrument will come up on each channel and then we'll tweak them individually to our heart's content. Be really cool Reddit to learn. So before we start, I'll give you a quick overview of this particular mixer and explain that how it's basically the same as you know any other analog mixer but we learned in the last section. Okay, as you can see, we have a 24 inputs here for subgroups and our master fader.

A lot of the top of the mixer here looks very similar with the trim pots, I found power and such but in the middle of the pot here is very different than the difference that you notice on the analog board. Each channel has its own set of redundant novice for each you an accent on a digital board like this caught up in your habit. One set of channel EQ accents in the lives that can be assigned to any particular channel that you like. So on an analog board, adding some high EQ on channel through be done in this way, just grab that dedicated high q knob on Channel three, and you're good to go. On a digital mixer, you'd select the third channel, and then go across to your common set of controls that would tweak this Selected Channel here. So adjust the high q on Channel three, select channel three here and go across here and adjust the height you so as you can see on this board, we have all of these controls but each particular channel that you just select down here you can see these guys change depending on which channel I think on Channel three, we boosted the highest.

So on child two, maybe we could stack out the highest and on channel one we could bring it up a little bit so you can see that just the high q has different settings On which channel, it remembers the setting for each channel that you've got a lot of stuff, you got a high pass filter or a roll off, you have a gate compressor limiter, full EQ here, that's but every channel that you have along here and this being a digital mixer, we have the flexibility of using the same I mean, it's just it's great to use the same set of common controls on whatever channel that we have selected down here. So I'm not going to get into you know, get bogged down in all the details of how to use this particular mixer because you know, you'll probably be using something different. But what I will be showing you other practical examples of what I call the big five things that we need to do with mixes and they are blending levels, using EQ, controlling dynamics using effects and mixing models.

So once you know that these are the main things to do, and I'll show you how then all you need to do is to find out how to access these functions through, you know your own mixer, whatever you're using. So for example, using EQ on an analog board is as simple as just selecting the EQ knobs on that particular channel. On a digital board like this, you'll probably select a channel and then use a common set of EQ controls to tweak that particular Selected Channel. Does that make sense between it, we're basically doing the same thing just a slightly different way. So just see that whether you're using a simple Mackie analog mixer, or a digital Yamaha, or even a digital mixer, your job is to get to the controls we'll be looking at and from then on, you know, we're basically doing everything the same.

Really give me any mixer. And if I know the answer to these few questions, how do I access EQ dynamics, effects and monta sense, then, you know, I'll be good to go. So again, don't be hung up on the fact that I might not be using your particular mixer. At the beginning of every topic, I'll point you how to find you know how to access that faction on your particular mixer. And then you know, we'll be up based on the same page. Make sense?

Good. Okay, so with that being said, let's go ahead and bring up a mix. God labeled all the channels across here, and we can start to pull them up. And we'll go ahead and start with the drums. So the first one here is the kick drum. So already, can you hear how this can bleed from other instruments there, it's, I mean, it's mainly the kick drum, but you can hear the snare drum in the background, but I fix that later on when we deal with gates and some of the other dynamic processes.

Right now that's a kick drum, snare drum. Just playing a side stick right now. A hi hat. maybe want to pan that hi hat out a little bit. So select it. Now I wouldn't want to pat it all the way to the right like I might do in a recording because that'll penalize some of the people who are not sitting like at the 12 o'clock.

You know, in a live situation, so I tend to be a little bit more reserved with my panning in a live situation. So bring up the Tom's and same thing, maybe on one there, too. There's some three there, boy there, overhead, let's do that all the way to the left and the right one all the way to the right, I would tend to be a little bit more aggressive with the panning of these guys. That's kind of recruits my drum. In fact, you might even want to use the subgroups that we learned about the board to manage the entire drum kit from just you know, a couple of faders rather than all of these guys. You remember how on an analog mixer, we hadn't Little assignment buttons here.

But each channel, we could then send each channel to a separate subgroup. And then, if you wanted to preserve any panning across the stereo spectrum, like in this example this I have, then you'd want to assign this to a stereo pair of subgroups. Exactly the same thing here on this console, we select any channel, and you can see that they are assigned to either main bus or to these subgroups over here, instead of those little buttons being down here, this over here, there are a common set of balance for each Selected Channel. So you can see each of these guys they're all sets to the main channel, we don't want to do that we want to subgroup these guys over here to a subgroup. So let's select the first one here, and these selected from the main and then bring it over here to the sub one.

So that'll work. You go through each one here and southern down to one but as we learned before, if you want to preserve your sanity Appearing, which we did remember, the hi hat was out here, our overheads were panned out wide. If we want to preserve those paintings, we really need to bring this over to a pair of subgroups. So, the first one, I would set up to sub one and two and D select main, the second one, I would do the same. And if you're dexterous knock, you can actually do this. That bone, bone, bone, bone, bone, bone, bone, bone.

Okay, I think I did it right. Just checking them all. All that one was Okay, it looks like all of them then. So now all these guys, one through 10. All these channels are deflected from the main over here, but they are brought over here to the subgroups one and two. But guess what if we select these guys, subs one and two, they're not assigned anywhere.

We need to assign them to the main and this one's the main And also pan them out wide. So the first one here goes all the way to the left. Second subgroup goes all the way to the right. And if I've done everything right, they should come up right about here. Very cool. So now you can balance the entire drum kit, just by using a couple of subgroups a lot easier to ride your drums with just a couple of fingers, rather than all these guys and kind of messing up your relative mix between all the drums.

So subgroups are just a great way to manage a whole bunch of channels over here. For example, I'd never have a bass guitar subgroup because there's no benefit right? By only having one bass guitar channel, assign that to a subgroup is kind of pointless. So what would good candidates be for subgroups drums is a classic because you have a whole bunch of channels over here that you quite often just want to ride the whole drums as a whole, they're perfect for subgroups here, you know, change the entire drum mix over here or just the individual hi hat over there. backing vocals are another one. If you have, say six backing vocalist over here, then sub them over and adjust all of them over here, or just maybe bring up the tenors, if you like over here if you need a little bit more bottom end on your backing vocal mix.

Now remember that you if you have any stereo panning going on over here, you'll need to pair sorry, sub over to a pair of subgroups here. And then pan those guys out wide to hear your panning choices over here. If you sub to a pair of subgroups, and then leave those subgroups his pants throughout the middle, then all your panning over here will just be in fact, by the way, a close cousin to subgroups of VCA groups with certain mixes have a fader that remotely control a bunch of other faders. So what I'd call a dumb subgroup is just an assignment of a bunch of faders onto another separate, that's just kind of like a routing thing, you know, to signal like that some mixes have VCA groups that remotely controlled faders. So, in other words, moving a VCA group is just like moving these guys here, which can affect any post or accent.

It's not really a big deal, but it might be a good place for you to do some further research if your mixer has VCA groups, or like you know, anything similar. In fact, no, some mixes also have mute groups where you can assign a bunch of channels so you can press just one button just to mute a bunch of them over here. Okay, so, back to mixing. Okay, so we bought all the drums up there coming up on a couple of different subjects here. Let's bring up the bass. of people have different approaches to mixing.

I tend to bring up this drums, bass. Then we could bring up Shannon here. out there acoustic Anyway, you get an idea as to where to get kind of just a basic mix up we'll deal with getting some of these things. Some of these things really need to be gated add compresses, EQ, but this is just kind of a good way just to kind of get a basic mix up kind of get an idea of what you're dealing with. I can't emphasize enough that there are many different schools of thought in terms of how to mix but all agree who has started the mixes and that is the lead vocal, absolutely. Go to any food court in the mall and listen to the background music.

You may not hear all of the instruments over the lunch crowd but you will hear the vocal Absolutely. The short make sure that your lead vocal is heard and then place all the other instruments in an accompaniment kind of around that. Now joked before that if you mix the band that consists of a bass guitar vocalist czar, fine then it would be pretty easy to mix as they all live in different areas of the tonal spectrum as you mixed together a band like this, you might start to find that some instruments overpower the others. That's because a lot of them live in the same Sonic space. Let's look at where each instrument lives. In the tonal spectrum we can see 10 octaves of an imaginary piano.

A real piano stops right about here. I've shaded the fundamental frequencies in dark and the overtones and harmonics in a lighter color. Basically, we can divide the tonal spectrum into four major segments, the lows from 20 hertz to 200 hertz, the low mids from 200 to 1000 hertz or one K, the high mids from one K to five K and and the highest from about five k on up. Check out each instrument where they live. You can see that the fundamentals of each instrument they really don't go much past one K, everything above that, a harmonics and other times but these areas are really important in the character the bat. So that Yeah, instruments that I think you can pull every thing out above that, the the end of the fundamentals.

If you want to accentuate certain frequencies, then I'd make a semi wide curb and boost a few dB. You know, a favorite of mine is to boost a little two k on the kick drum to get that smack of the beta. And you might think this is the vocal rat range. Well, it is but the kick drums transit is really short that weren't really giving away too much. But the really valuable thing about boosting the smack of the kick drum is that you can make the kick drum sound so much louder without boosting up the fundamental, you know volume which takes a lot of power to do low frequency elements like kick and bass have to move a lot of air. So if you can increase the perceived loudness by boosting some of their higher frequency overtime, then all the better.

Now if the snare is sounding too thin or quote up and bring up around to her heads, we're kind of a tug Venus lives right there. vocals can sometimes Dan have five K and 14 k boost a little just to give them some air I have a bunch of tips and tricks in our EQ recipes in the bonus bonuses on the third disc, feel free to try them out. But but it doesn't boost more than just a few DB as you start to introduce new products. Let's go through a few of the inputs and mess with every cue. Okay, so we'll start off with the kick drum and the first thing to go out to is the fundamental kick drums about 60 hertz. So dial that in and embrace that, you'll get some idea bass drum radical, fundamental, pull it out, and there's really nothing much left.

Now, the next one I'd go off to is what I call the boxiness of the kick drum. It happens around 200 hertz. Yeah, it kind of laps around right there. You can just scoot that out a little bit. Now let's take a EQ in and out. Okay, that's starting to sound good.

Okay, then now we'll go for that. The kind of the smack of that pizza which only happens around two K, slide around and disappear, you can see I mean, it really loses all that this is maca that. try anything that without back in. Okay, so now let's try with the seizure machine if it were a side stick right now, but the first thing I'd go is kind of what the fatness around 130 hertz can be set up to actually a snare drum and a second data here in a sec. Okay, that kind of gives us right there. boxiness to the snare drum normally around 300 heads.

Yeah, you can hear it right there. If you narrow that up and go fishing, when I call fishing that that's the sound right there. You just pull out a few DBS right there to scoop that out. That'll sound a whole Nice and the next thing I do is celebrate solace there and then go after kind of the snappiness of the snare, which is around two K, just boost that. And then what I would call it kind of a sizzle, which is over if I was to go over here to about 8k and just spruce that up. That'll give this a little sizzle test so it's out.

Back in. Cool, we're getting somewhere. Okay, now, the hi hat. You know what to do. There's nothing on the line here. So I would roll off all all those lines is nothing there at all that that leads now the job's done.

The next thing I'd go is a problem. Springtown called the Clank which is around 500 hertz. You can hear right there. That out just gently there and add some three k obviously too much and then just add some sizzle around six K. Let's do some before and after. Cool okay under the times I've made a loop of these times we'll just go around here. Tom's the Baptist is about 120 hertz.

They have boxing is probably around 500 depending on the size of the drum, same thing just boost it until you get that horrible thing that you want to get rid of a ninja scoop out there. Little bit of this sound kind of a snap will happen around to cat and maybe four or five came up with that great thing about having a digital mixer is all those big changes can be copied to Tom two, three and Boyd just to highlight that in that way. So let's see how that goes in contact. Okay under overhead what the person would take out you bet would draw up all the lows absolutely nothing down there a value would be a capturing no add just around the 10 case like that. Talk about everything the other day. To see how that drum kit this will sound a whole lot better when we start getting as well.

Okay, so we're on to bass guitar. Now, in terms of the bass guitar, there tends to be kind of a boxiness, around 200 hertz or normally just generally scoop a little bit out there. And also at 600, he can tend to back up and some people call a honk Enos right there, we can we just put a little bit of that out. We don't want to do a lot here. But then in terms of getting definition to get that pink or pink noise, put around two K, might boost a little bit of that and then maybe bring up a little bit of the fundamental there. Let's add that Okay, I will go on to the channel here, I would say probably the most one of the boxes around 300 maybe keep it up maybe a little bit of brightness around the machine is probably up around eight lot of changes here but just pulling Out of that box to the right hand side in context with the other side got acoustic guitar here, in terms of this guitar.

I normally just do the same thing baby See how these guys we haven't done a lot to bring up And cheese around you bring just sliced no The things we're looking for is, tends to be something around 300 hertz it's boxy it's around 500 hertz nicely is between one and four K and if you want like a kind of a shame around 1012 k that does sound brings it up there. And once you've brought up something and it's, it's pretty close to what you want, then we can copy that over to our background. And male and female vocals can be different, but quite often just copying from one record sound to another sound was a good way to kind of get a beginning to work. Of course these will pop out a whole lot more once we compress them and gave them a compression is really what brings that makes.

So you can see that with a little operative word there little issue. You can help can help. build you a mix where you start to hear, you know each element a little bit clearer. And it brings a little bit of clarity to mix, there's another use of EQ in which we can pull out certain problems. Now, if we were to take an issue like this, and we could wrap up the game, and we'll narrow up that tune, so therefore, we are just boosting a very small band of frequencies, then we can sweep that all the way up to the top of the spectrum, all the way down until actually problem just pops its head straight out. Once it's popped its head out and we've identified that then we can take the game and we can pull that down to get rid of that problem that I've put that little Gremlin in, kind of you can see still there.

It's not like you can get rid of him completely. But with a narrow enough cue and the right type of problem, you can really get a lot of these problems just suck them right out with a very narrow band EQ. Let's look at a practical example. Okay, let's look at EQ problems. First I'll play the song. And why can you hear that big effect?

So this guitar is right on this guitar track. Now if you're listening a little tinny laptop speakers, you may not be able to hear that hum. But if you're listening with headphones, or through some decent speakers, you're here there's a nasty hum on that guitar. So we can use the technique that we learned a little while ago by turning on this EQ and what I'll do is turn on this band edge remember what we did, we ramped up the game. We narrowed down the cue right? And then we sweep that cue around until that problem frequency pops its head up.

Let's have a listen. Swimming In closing, we can hear that really loud and clear right here. So remember what we did. Now we've accentuated that area. So it's kind of like that whack a mole technique. If you've ever gone to the fair and recommends way, the whole idea is you wait for the little threats head up and then you try to hit it.

That's what we're trying to do here. We're trying to accentuate the problem. We're certainly not going to leave it like that just made the problem worse, but what we did by making it worse, we've allowed it to kind of stick up its ugly head, then we can take this game and we can just shop that straight out. Check out how it sounds like a lot of that actually got taken out And the trick to fixing problems in your frequency spectrum. And it could be something like amazingly quality and vocal, maybe a booming listener for Tom. So maybe in this example, which is a harmonic guitar track, what you end up doing is cranking up the game, make sure the queue is nice and narrow and a switcheroo until you find the problem, then suck it out.

So the trick to fixing problems in your frequency spectrum. And I mean, this could be everything from a nicely quality or in a vertical or gloominess in a full time or how many guitar track is to crank the gain up, narrow that band up and slide around until that problem just pops its head right out and then you can cut down and just slice out a thin slice of frequencies to reduce that problem. I call this the whack a mole technique as it's kind of like that game you play at the fair. You wait till a problem you know pops its head And then you just, you know, his over his over the head and pull it up a notch. Yeah, frequency range is a really great place to start if you have some problems, you know, in your particular child, keep the knotch very narrow to avoid cutting out, you know any good stuff, particularly if the good stuff and the problem live in the same area.

I mean, if you had a track that was maybe you know, some high hats that had a 60 cycle harmonic, you can easily crank out that 60 cycle without worrying about the source material. However, a 60 cycle hum on a bass guitar track that lives down there, you're that'll need much more kid is it that kind of makes sense. You could also use EQ to pull out a whole frequency ranges like the 80 hertz roll up or take the rumble out of vocal track, you know, and maybe one of the roll up the treble I kick drum track or bass guitar tracks take out the unwanted hiss. Be careful this and only take out the frequency ranges that are obviously well away from all the good stuff. The really low end away from you know a symbol overhead mic and really high end from a bass track you kind of get the picture