Original subtitles

Greetings! I'm Chris Lord-Alge, and welcome to The Twilight Zone.

You've now entered a new dimension, a dimension of analog mixing.

Today we have a song by Chris Daughtry, it's called 'It's Not Over'.

Very popular song by Chris.

It's a song I've mixed...

Nik, how long ago? Eleven years ago? - Most exactly.

- I mixed it eleven years ago, and two days or three days from today.

And we're going to do this like we did it before, do it from scratch, ride it up, and Rock n' Roll! So here is how it's done, here in my studio, on my SSL.

We have this thing that's called a track sheet.

I know, it's a piece of history.

This might as well be like the Dead Sea Scrolls.

It's that old, okay? What this tells me is what's coming up on my console, all right? Coming directly from Pro Tools through all these outputs.

So, originally this would have been a track sheet for a tape, a tape machine which I have.

So it's a 48-track, and it could have been 24-track analog, but for us, since I use 44 tracks of my console for audio, here we go! So, I will write it up.

A little grease pencil.

If you're in Pro Tools, you could do the same thing to your tracks, so when you're looking at them in the Mix window, it can be similar.

I like it short and sweet, so I have Vocal, Vocal Double, I have the 'BV's, I have a 'VH', which is vocal harmony.

I'm going to adjust my pans as I look at it, okay? Then I have a Guitar Solo, then I have Guitar 4, which I just put a '4' there.

I have Acoustic Guitar, a big 'A'.

Guitar 1, '1'.

Guitar 2, '2'.

Guitar 3. Nice and simple. Stereo pairs.

Then, Kick Drum, which I call 'FT', as in foot.

I've been doing this since I was very young.

The person who trained me, my mentor, Steve Jerome, the first thing I noticed was that he was writing 'FT' for the kick drum.

I said, "Steve, what's with the 'FT'?" He goes, "It's the foot. That's what I know, that's what I like." Well, I adopted that and it will never change, so, unless it says foot, I don't know what it is.

If it says 'kick', I'm like, "What's a 'kick'?" So, 'FT' is my foot.

Snare is just an 'SN' for me.

Toms are a stereo pair, so a big 'T'.

An 'O' for the overheads.

I have an 'R' for the room, so, stereo pairs there.

I have my snare sample I'll call 'SN2'.

I have my second snare sample, 'SN3'.

That's for the center.

I have a snare bottom, just an arrow pointing down.

Hi-hat, ride, most likely...

It could be drummer's perspective. We'll find out.

Usually, if the hi-hat track is on an odd number, it's left.

Even numbers are right, odds are left.

'HH', and then 'R' for the ride.

And then, what's left? A mono room up the center.

We'll just put 'MONO' there.

And then I have a second kick sample.

'FT2', right? So, after the second kick drum, let's move on to the bass.

On this record I have four tracks of bass.

So, this is a Howard Benson production, which, I've done many records with Howard, and this was one of our finest moments and one of our big songs.

He had a special way of doing the bass on four tracks, which means a designated distortion track, the DI, the bass amp of choice, and then a sub track, which was really cool because it was just like a miked subwoofer.

So it was basically everything below about 50.

So, really cool to have that combination, so I'll just call it 'DIST' (distortion), 'DI', 'AMP', and then 'SUB'.

Then I have four faders left and it looks like I have...

...a whole lot of nothing down there.

Empty parking for future stuff, okay? Then we scoot around this way.

My last four faders will be really exciting.

'SHAKER'.

Skip a channel, then Guitar 5, okay? So, we'll see if this holds up for us.

We have the console basically normalled and flat.

Okay, welcome to The Outboard Zone.

You have now entered the dimension of outboard equipment.

As you've all acquired plug-ins over the years, or over the months, or over the time you've had your rig, I've acquired my outboard gear.

So, since I've been at this a few days longer than you, before plug-ins, these were my plug-ins.

So, when you go and buy a delay plug-in like...

...any of the ones that are out there, or you buy a compressor plug-in, I did the same thing with my outboard gear.

A person who turned me on to equipment was Dan Hartman, he showed me the magic of the 1176, okay? Obviously, I've gotten a few of them and they have a great sound.

And then if we look at the LA-3As, it's another one that, once I had one, why not have a few? Another interesting one is this device, which started here, as the Vac Rac.

Steve Firlotte created these, and my brother and I got the first ones.

And we liked them as limiters because they were very simple: two knobs.

Not a lot to do. Just make it sound good, right? And this spurred on his whole line, like Rev A, Rev B, Rev C.

So those are something I use, right? And then if we move, we have 1176s, got the LA-3s.

And then, of course, I wanted to make sure I had some Neves, so I got all three flavors of the Neve compressor that I like.

Something else that I use, right? We look over here, there's more versions of the "1176 style" compressor, right? The 1178.

And then, of course, we have some Distressors, some de-essers, and a continuation, right? And then if we just go this way a little bit, we can see that I still like analog delay.

Now, I started using these when they first came out.

You're probably familiar with these. This is another device.

I like analog delay, so I use those.

And other vintage pieces.

Ultra-Harmonizers, okay? Well, I'm using it for reverb because it's different.

Bricasti, a modern piece of equipment.

Here's some more flavors of what I use.

So, the simple fact of it is I like these on my vocals.

I like using these delays on guitars.

I like using this style of delay.

I like these reverbs on vocals.

I also like these.

These are tube compressors by Steve Firlotte.

I like these on vocals, right? I like these blue compressors on my lead vocals.

And then the black 1176s, which you see a few different random flavors on, are for bass or for some guitar parts, or even for some drum things.

I like these 1178s on my drums.

These LA-3As are prepared to be used on guitars, acoustic or whatever.

So, these are my plug-ins and my flavors.

Now, the Neves are kind of something I use for a special occasion.

I kind of like these on snare drum.

So, that's it for now.

There's still plenty of stuff to use and learn, right? So, I don't use it all, but it's all here just in case.

It's really simple how they're set up.

If you have a vocal coming in, set at a certain level, I have these set so when I...

when I turn this compressor on my vocal, it's set to give me just the right amount of compression, so when I put it in, it's the right level, and it gives me a little bit of a level boost after him.

So, it's kind of set up for unity gain.

What I mean by unity gain is that if your signal is coming in at a nice, healthy, zero level, when I insert the compressor, I'm going to get the desired compression effects, okay? If I have more level coming in, I'm going to get more compression.

So sometimes, if I have this much...

okay, this much level coming in, I'm going to get this much compression.

If I lower it, I'll get less compression.

So, it's all really based on how loud the signal is coming in to me.

So that's how we define it.

The same thing in Pro Tools.

If you have a vocal in Pro Tools and you put an 1176 plug-in on it, if you clip-gain the vocal up and have it set the same way, it's going to compress more.

So it's set up exactly the same way as a plug-in insert, okay? So I have it set, as I said, in unity.

If this doesn't compress, I'm not getting enough gain.

That means the vocal is not coming in loud enough.

With a guitar, if it's not compressing, I need to clip-gain the guitar up.

Same with the drums, same with anything.

So all these plug-ins, or all my outboard gear, is completely designed absolutely the same as a plug-in in Pro Tools.

You insert it, and if the level you're sending to it is right, it'll give you a desired compression effect and come back at about the same level as what you sent it.

There you are. The Outboard Dimension.

Let's talk about where the signal comes from, and where is it going.

I have my Pro Tools system sitting in front of me, I have my session, okay? So I am outputting it to buses, so those buses feed directly to me on the console.

They go through my D to As, which is my 3348 D to A system.

It goes D to A into my console, which is line level, right? So, my insert point for my plug-ins and my outboard is on the channel.

It's not really any different, but what happens is you have Pro Tools, okay? Then the bus outputs feeding through the D to A, which is basically zero level, it's just a D to A so there's no level change there.

It comes straight into the console, that's the same level, and then, what happens is, that's where my insert point is, and I can make my insert point pre-EQ or post-EQ.

So my insert could be pre or post.

I like them post. That's what I do.

Some things are pre.

It's all seasoned to taste.

Then, after that, I have this thing called the fader.

So, just as you have your Mix window with faders, I have my faders, except I'm going through an analog console to get to my faders, okay? So, for example, if you set up your song to be 48 Buses, and you had 48 Aux Returns, and all your audio feeding through the buses, it would be exactly the same thing.

If you took a channel strip plug-in, put it on your Aux, put an insert on it, it's the same process I'm doing here, except I'm physically going through a piece of analog equipment.

Once it comes through my console, it goes through my 2-mix bus, which is just stereo. Everything feeds the stereo.

And of course, across it I have my outboard equipment, which I have my Focusrite Red 3 compressor, and that feeds into my pair of Pultecs that are on the rack.

So, after that point, it feeds from that directly to a second Pro Tools system that mixes at 96/24. Okay? Why do I not mix back to my session? Simple: my sessions are 48/24, my mixes are 96/24.

I want my mixes to be high-res.

Why? Because the mixes are way more complicated data.

My stereo pairs are super complicated.

A kick, a snare, a guitar, a hi-hat...

Well, at 48/24, after all the EQ I do, then it's a complex waveform, and that's what your mix needs to be.

So, if you have only one Pro Tools system to mix back to, well, that's fine if that's what you need to do, but for me, it's a separate Pro Tools system just for the 2-tracks, and one for the multitracks, so, keep them separated! So now we have the song written up on the console.

I have a few fader parking spots.

So, what I want to do now is I have my assistant, Nik, and we will fire this thing up.

Since I'm using my SSL, I have a disk in here so I'm going to put my Title.

I'm just going to create my Cue List.

I have a cue list in Pro Tools, which is fine.

So, what I will do is listen to some of the audio, and then put my cues in my session, and then I'll start working on the song.

So the first thing I'm going to do is just play the track and see what happens.

All right! Let's go back to 1997, because this computer will not go past 2000.

It has the Y2K bug, so we can't even put the proper data there anymore.

So, the date is inconsequential.

So, obviously, let's put the artist name in, which is Chris Daughtry.

And I will try not to misspell that.

And boom, it put his name in there, and the client is 19 Entertainment.

Boom! And the producer is Howard Benson.

Okay.

Oh, 'I don't understand, STINKY'.

Okay. So, it's very easy to make typos here.

And there we go.

Okay.

And our assistant is Nik Karpen.

Okay! Very simple! 1986 technology! Then, we now have a title, 'It's Not Over'.

So I'm going to quickly throw up some quick faders here.

And we got verse 1.

Actually, I think this thing starts with the verse.

So I will restart it, and let's see where verse 1 is.

- I think it's that call one.

- I think it's right at the top, isn't it? Like, one second.

We'll keep the cues very simple.

We never want to have a different letter...

two letters that are the same in there, so we want a different letter every time.

For me, since I'm automating here, a 10 second pre-roll before each mix is what I'm used to.

I've been doing that since the beginning of time.

Why is there a 10 second pre-roll in there? Because it takes a few seconds for these things to lock up and be in time.

If you don't put a pre-roll before it, you're going to run into problems.

I started putting pre-roll before mixes when I was running two 24-track machines.

I'll tell you how much that fun isn't.

You have two tape machines and they have to lock each time, so when you go to the beginning, they're both swinging around, then we hit Play to get them locked, and be locked when it plays.

So every time you rewind and fast-forward, you got like two guys trying to find each other.

I was really happy in 1989 when I got my 48 DASH tape machine, so I never had to use two machines again.

Okay, so now I'll be starting with the kick drum.

I've added some low end, taken out some lower mids, added some top.

A little compression.

I'm looking over at what's feeding the console and the levels looked just about right for what I need, so I'm not going to really have to do much adjusting over there.

So, I'll move on to the snare.

Just like I do with every song, I'm going to get some general sounds and then fine-tune it all together as a package.

So I'll move forward.

Then, now I'm happy with the snare drum right now.

I'm going to move on to the overheads and start adding in the other drum bits here.

I always check the phase of the overheads against the drums.

Well, here they're in phase, so no problem there.

So, with the overheads...

I'm not even going to compress them to start with because they make such a good balance here, so I'm just adding some low end to bring out the snare drum and just a little bit of sharpness.

Some 3 kHz, a little 8 kHz, just to bring some top end there.

I'm not compressing it yet.

See, I don't use every compressor all the time.

We'll just check the room tracks out.

So with the room tracks, the same thing, I'm kind of adding a similar EQ like I did on the overheads but not any more bottom.

Why am I not compressing the room? Why does everyone have to have a compressed room track all the time? Well, if I start compressing the room track even more it's just going to bring up all these cymbals and all of this crap, and you know what else is going to do? It's going to kill the snare drum.

So I'll start without it having the hammer on it, okay? And keep it simple, right? I'll move forward and see what else I have here.

So they already have a mono room that's been compressed, so I can feed that in.

I don't have to do anything to it.

It's already got some stuff on it.

Am I going to give it like a similar EQ boost as I did the other rooms? Yes, so they kind of match each other.

So we'll move forward.

So the next step is I add in the extra kick drum, which I just feather in for the tone.

And I add the hi-hat/ride.

Same thing with the overheads.

I checked the phase because there was a lot of snare drum coming through the hi-hat/ride.

Do I sit there and thin it out so there's nothing but top end in it? No. Why would I do that? These are point mics, okay? It's basically like if you mike an orchestra and you have some point mics on the violins.

You move them in. Are you going to thin those out? No, you're just going to add them full-range.

If I thin it out, then the snare goes away.

Why would I want the snare to go away from any mic? Right? So I just listen to my mix, and I add those in.

I also solo the overheads and figure out, "Where is the hi-hat? Where is the hi-hat in that image?" It's the most important thing you do: if you solo the overheads, you see where the hi-hat is.

If the hi-hat is left, then we're talking about drummer's perspective, right? If the hi-hat is right, it's audience perspective.

How the overheads are, I'm just going to keep it that way.

So this is now going to be drummer's perspective, so, my panning is correct.

The session came that way.

So, I'm moving forward here.

So, I'll look at the tom tracks.

An important thing about toms: you can prepare them, which is cut away the leakage, right? Cut away the leakage, except for the fills.

I prefer to just, if it's a tom fill, all tom mics come on.

When the tom fill is over, all tom mics go off.

Some people cut each mic individually.

That's not what I prefer.

I prefer it as a pair so that it opens up the scene, closes the scene down.

And I try to do it so the toms end with the next crash cymbal, if possible.

Then you'll say, "Well, the toms ring over." Well, you know what? If your overhead tracks have some low end into it, it will fade right into that and it will be fine.

So, I try to keep it simple there.

Since the toms are cut away, I can EQ them and not have to worry about all these crash cymbals coming through.

So, if we look at the toms, I will add some upper bottom to the high tom, and some lower bottom to the lower tom.

And the panning spectrum, okay? I like them pretty wide.

I don't like them to be exactly how you see it because people wearing headphones aren't looking at the drummer, they are listening to the music, so you want it to be cool.

And then, for me, it's real simple: add a little bit of compression, and add some top and a little bit of bottom.

Take out a bunch of the 500, which is the boxy part of the tom, and then just blend it in with the package, and see if you can get them loud enough.

So I always check that.

There was one fill right there.

So I checked those, I have those balanced, I have a basic start point here.

Then at this point I can say, "Okay, am I going to have some drum reverb to my drums?" And I'm like, "Why not?" So, I will select, as you have on Pro Tools, you have your sends.

I've had sends before you had them, okay? So I can say, "Okay, I'm going to put some reverb." I'll use my sends here and put some reverb on the room track, on the samples, the drum samples, right? I'll put a little bit on the snare bottom, okay? I'm not going to put it on the hi-hat or the ride.

The mono room, yes.

Am I going to put it on the kick or the snare? No.

I'll put a little bit on the toms, right? So I'm only putting it on the indirect mics, and the reason why is that that's...

I just want to extend the ambience, not create some from the dry sounds.

Now, if you put reverb on the dry kick drum, it's going to sound different than if you put reverb on the room for the kick drum, okay? That's not the sound I want.

Now, some of you say, "I want to put reverb on the snare drum." Well, enjoy yourself, okay? That's a different sound. That's not my sound.

My sound is not putting reverb on the direct signals, but putting it on the ambient signals which would be the samples, or the rooms, because I just want to extend that.

I don't want to get that proximity of the snare drum into the reverb.

You're EQ'ing all this bottom into the snare drum to get the impact.

That's not going to sound so great in the reverb.

At that point, if you want to do dry signal, "snare drum reverb," well, there's a million ways you can do it.

The way I do it, the way we're seeing here, is this way.

So, I've set some reverb, okay? You know, I have my Sony reverb and I have a Bricasti that I link together.

So, I combine those two reverbs.

They're both set at one second.

Like anything, you can pick any reverb that you like. Right? And so, if you set it to one second with no pre-delay, it's apples and oranges, it's a flavor, right? So, the reverbs I have aren't really available in Pro Tools, but, they're very similar to ones you have.

So, you could take anything, a plate, a chamber, whatever, and find something that is like a room, and put it at one second, and you're going to have a similar result.

So, my sonic result is going to be different because I'm using outboard gear, but it's still the same concept, the same way you put it together.

So, you send from the drums on the "indirect" signals, find the reverb that you like, there is a million of them in Pro Tools now, bring that up on some returns, and feather it in.

So, we're going to hear what feathering in the reverb sounds like to the drums, okay? And this is just my flavor of reverb, all right? Now I've just added both my reverbs.

So what I have, and you can do this in Pro Tools, is that you take a send and send it to two reverbs.

I use two reverbs.

"Why, Chris, do you use two reverbs?" Because I want the two flavors.

Because I can.

Because two reverbs are better than one.

One has this character, one has that character.

To be honest with you, if I could have four reverbs on one send, I would do it.

Together, it's just a better sound, so, I bring them up equally.

A song like this, I can tell already is kind of a dry song, so it's not a big anthemic reverb song.

It's going to be a little bit on the dry side, so, a couple of reverbs at one second, and I'll even set this one to 1. It's on 1.25.

Spin the wheel back to 1.0.

They're both set at 1.0.

So, really simple.

It's not rocket science, but all I'm doing is I'm going to be extending the length of the ambience without destroying the cymbals or the hi-hat, because I don't want those to get messy.

They're going to get a little messy because the room tracks obviously have that in it, but they don't have direct signals, so it makes more sense.

Parallel compression.

Let's explain that.

It's real simple.

You send the signal from your drums over to another set of channels and you could have a stereo compressor there, okay? So that's what we do.

We do it at unity gain, so, what does that mean by unity gain? Whatever balance you have on the drums, it follows it.

When you put all the sends at zero, from your drums, you send that to your parallel compression with the same panning.

All it does is it gives you an additive sound to it.

So, in our configuration, we use buses.

We don't use sends, we use buses, so we bus it to those appropriate.

We check our buses for the panning.

They're all working! We make sure they're right.

Then, for me, I have a pair of Neve compressors.

If you have a plug-in, it would be the 33609 plug-in, if you want to use that.

You would set your Threshold at zero, your Recovery at 100 milliseconds.

Your Gain doesn't matter, your gain is just your gain structure.

Your gain could be at zero.

And I'll leave it at 8.

And then, your Ratio, which is your compression ratio, 2:1.

That is your setting, okay? That's exactly what they're doing right up here, and not stereo-linked.

Why not stereo-linked? Because I don't stereo-link anything, okay? Period.

If you want to stereo-link, enjoy yourself.

If you have a big tom hit on the left, what is it going to do? It's going to duck the right.

So then, what does that do to your drum sound? So, why do that? "Well, Chris, the kick drum is going to move around." Well, bloody dah! I want it to be stereo, not mono.

If you link it, it makes it sound more mono, so I don't link, all right? So we just do it nice and simple, and then we have it come up on a pair of channels.

Like in Pro Tools, you would have it go to an Aux, come up on another fader, and you can season to taste how much you want there, okay? And then, for me, I add a little bit of EQ to that.

I add like 3 dB at 8 kHz, 3 dB at 60, and that just kind of adds a little bit more point to those pairs.

So, you have your drums, and then you have another pair, like these, and it brings it back.

And for me, I have this, and I'll bring it back here.

We'll play those drums.

So, no parallel.

It's subtle, but inside the record, it's helpful.

We have a shaker in here.

I will not put the shaker in with the parallel because I don't want it to get even more in your face.

I want it to be subtle.

A shaker is one of those things that if you think it's loud, it's louder. Okay? So, as we get older and deafer, the shaker is one of those things you don't hear after a while.

So, I think when I'm 90, all my mixes will have really loud shaker in it, and tambourine.

Funny stuff there.

We have our start point with the drums.

Let's look at what is happening with our bass.

Since this bass is very well recorded, I don't think it's going to require too much.

I'm going to listen to the bass with the drums in because the bass is never going to be in solo, so it's never going to matter.

It's always going to sound good in solo.

It's how it sounds in the track.

So what we're doing is really simple.

If I'm going to add 6 dB at 5 kHz with a Bell curve, I'm going to do it to the distortion, to the DI, and to the amp, just so I add the same amount of treble boost to all three.

The sub track, well, if I add some 5 kHz to that, that's not going to do much because that's got nothing but low end in it.

Then all four of those basses are getting an 1176, okay? So they're all getting some compression to hold them in there, to take up a little bit less space.

So, really simple, in your Pro Tools rig, you EQ into your 1176 and you have four of them there.

And then you just blend that in with your track.

In your scenario, if you don't want to use four separate ones, you can use one and just bounce it to one.

In this scenario, I'd probably use four different ones because distortion is going to compress differently than the DI, than the amp, and the sub.

But, to be really honest with you, you could take these four, you could take your four faders of bass, send them down to either my bass plug-in, which is a similar vibe, or just use one 1176.

At the end of the day, it's not going to be the biggest difference.

Why am I using four? Because these basses are coming up on four faders.

Let's talk about where we're at.

We just did some drums and bass, but I want you to notice that since everyone thinks that Chris Lord-Alge uses more compressors than God, and I have them, doesn't mean I use them all.

In this scenario, I listen with my ears and say, "Does that need a compressor? Or does it not?" Well, in this situation, the drums have zero compression except the kick has a slight amount, just to kind of flatten the dynamic.

Everything else is as it came, just EQ'ed, right? For now.

We'll see if that holds up.

Now, the only compression the drums would be getting is a little parallel, and, of course, I start with my bus compressor in.

Always. I have a bus compressor chain that I use.

It's kind of my sound, it's dialed, I start there.

That means the glue I want is there from the get-go.

I'm building it with the glue.

And it's just always how I work, which means, you know, the finisher is kind of in there helping me start with the start of it.

I'm not running the bass to the drum parallel.

That's just for drums.

Sometimes I do, but in this instance, the bass sounds fine.

I will only do that if the bass really needs some help, but in this situation, I'm only doing drums parallel.

So, we're going to look at the rest of the song here and just...

just kind of the arrangement to kind of figure out how much guitars I have going on here, how much help they need.

So, we'll peek at those next.

The song starts out with a clean guitar and there's a few other ones that come in.

So, I just do a little season to taste here.

The first thing is I'll look at the acoustic which is probably the most dynamic of them because, look, distorted guitars, distortion means they are compressed beyond compression and into distortion.

Do you really need to compress them? Maybe not, maybe they just get dark from all the distortion.

So, we'll look at what's dynamic in the record as the acoustics and take a peek at what they're going to do.

And I look at my session and I see, okay, we have acoustics playing in chorus 1, and chorus 2 and 3.

So, I will go to C2, which is a longer stretch, and just check them out there.

Play that section.

For this example, what I'll do for acoustic, I love my LA-3As, which are back over here.

They're all set like we talked about earlier with the certain gain structure.

So I'll add a little bit of 3 kHz, a little bit of 8 kHz, take off some of the bottom because as soon as you move a mic to an acoustic guitar closer and closer, it gets woofier and...

So, more and more bass happens as you get closer, so, obviously, to get it in your face, you're going to have some low end, so you got to suck some of that off.

And then, when you compress it, what's the compressor doing? It's bringing the low end up.

You're probably going to end up thinning it out a bit.

That's the first thing we do to those guys.

So, we'll listen further to the other guitars.

We'll just play the chorus because the verses are kind of open.

In most songs, chorus 2 has the activity, so, you use these as places to start with your balancing.

As we're listening to the guitars, what we find in this song is that we have a pair of power chords, like a line playing along, and rather than compressing them, because they're already distorted, the compression is not going to make it better.

They're pretty dark, and the problem sometimes with the heavy distorted guitars is that they are kind of scooped-sounding.

So, you're kind of missing some of the midrange and the bark, so I'm just adding some 2 kHz.

I'm adding a little bit of 100.

I'm adding some low end because I want them to have some heat in the low end.

And just trying not to make them too fuzzy, but get some of the upper midrange so I hear the notes more.

The problem with fuzzy distorted guitars is the notes go away because these guys, it's all top and all bottom and you don't even know what they're playing.

So you want to kind of dig out the note.

That's the secret to me, if I can hear the chord changes clear.

Then they have a...

a lead guitar line that plays along with it, which is...

So there, what we're trying to do is a similar approach.

It's dark. Now, it being dark makes it kind of be in a certain midrange area, but we always want to make sure there's clarity on top of that so we can peek over the power chords.

As I solo it there, you hear it.

I'll play it again.

And then, if I add the acoustic in, you hear all three.

This is our chorus right here.

Three things.

Imagine that! A song with three parts in the chorus.

Not that you see that very often, but it was a huge hit and it worked.

Now we'll show you the before and after here, so here, they play chorus 2.

And at that point we have the package, right? While we're doing this, we could also, while we are in solo, you're going to hear this.

If you hear this in the headphones, you're going to hear this come up, which is my parallel EQ, okay? So, as we do with the drums, okay? We do the same thing with the guitars.

They're in pairs, we send them to a send, a bus, bring it down to another channel.

What's on that channel? An EQ.

What's it doing? It's adding some more heat to it, right? It's adding some lower midrange and some top end.

What's that doing? That's just making the whole guitar package go 'GRRR!', come more forward.

So, we do that and season that to taste, so it's basically like taking all the instruments and adding like a little bit of a supercharger to it.

So, adding a parallel EQ.

Is it being compressed? No. It's just straight up EQ.

So, also in here, some more disclosure on what we're doing.

The acoustic guitar is kind of peaky on this record, so we add an L1 on it before it gets to me.

It's not really moving, okay? There might be one spot coming up where we see a move coming here.

It's probably grabbing one peak out of the whole record.

There it is, so...

It's kind of there just to keep it from running out of control.

You don't see any compression but you kind of hear what it's doing.

So, it's a little bit of a helper.

From what I remember, I think this is all Phil X playing, all these guitars.

I could be wrong, but he's played on most of these productions with Howard.

And he's a good friend of mine, he's now out with Bon Jovi, rocking the free world.

This song is a very simple guitar song.

Your verse guitar.

This is one stereo pair.

It sounds like a JC-120 Chorus.

Just stereo. One performance.

Then we move up to the acoustic.

It's a stereo track which just has two performances, so, hey, acoustic 1, and double.

A stereo track. Imagine that! You could actually do this, folks.

You could actually take your multi-miked acoustic performances that you probably have spread out over six tracks, or something, and make it into a pair.

And guess what happens when it's a pair? It makes the vertical real estate a lot smaller.

And you know what? If we can make this a garden apartment, it's a home run.

Then we move on to the verse guitar.

A double here, which is a single track, so I don't know why they call it double.

But anyway, then we move down to the chorus guitar.

That's a pair.

That's two tracks.

We have a verse guitar riff that happens all by itself, which is just a different part.

Then, if we look down at the rhythm guitars further down the screen, we have the chorus guitars, which is a single performance, then doubled.

Then, the triple quad.

That means there's four passes of the chorus.

He did it once, again, again, and again.

It may have been different guitars, but we combine all four of those performances to a pair.

Why? They're playing the same part.

The only time they're not is the pickup into chorus 2, and the pickup into chorus 1 is only one pair, so it's pretty simple layout.

And on top of the screen � top of the screen, mom! � is a solo guitar.

Happens in the tag and in the solo.

I know your productions now can spread far and wide, so this shows you a little simpler situation.

All these tracks are stereo, except, obviously, the lead guitar is a mono track.

Our fill-in, which is this thing called, I guess, 'Vrs2GtrDbl-02', is a one-time event in verse 2.

Everything else is a stereo pair.

So, very simple, so I can kind of concentrate that in my bucket of guitars, then three faders over here in my 22-23-24 area.

Look at the whole screen, there is our vertical song.

I can see it all! When I can see it all, I'm not intimidated in the least by it.

If you can make your sessions look this way, if possible, it certainly makes it a lot more manageable.

Let's move forward and see how this all works together as a package with the rhythm section.

But one thing I'm going to do right here, I noticed there's like a feedback moment in the song.

I'm going to check my original mix from back in 1999.

It's not even there, so let's just mute it.

Put your fade in it, and it's gone by verse 2.

Even better! So it always makes sense to refer to the original mix or to whatever mix is in the session, always, to see about arrangements.

For me, I'm like, "I don't remember that feedback, and the feedback sounds kind of like it shouldn't be there," so I checked the original mix.

And, of course, rather than me sitting here and manipulating a fade, it's gone. So we just fade it out and it's over.

Always kind of refer to the rough, or the original mix, to any arrangement issues.

So, a simple one right there.

We just eliminate that part.

We'll see how our blend is here...

...from chorus 1.

Let's see how it's shaping up.

I think with this clean guitar we'll just add a little LA-3A.

We want to make it take up a little bit less space so it's a little bit creamier, a little bit cooler-sounding, so, add some compression on that.

So, that and the acoustic become the only guitars we are compressing right now.

So, we'll move forward with that.

So we listen to our original mix there just to make sure that we're not missing anything.

Look, we want to recapture the vibe, we don't ever take for granted where it came from or where it's going, so we want to have all the information.

So if I say, "Oh, I don't need to listen to that, I'm just doing it this way," well, you know, just make sure you're improving, or maintaining.

And one thing we noticed is there's probably, now that we have the session here, we can do a little move here to make it more exciting and save myself a bit of automation.

So, Nik, the guitars leading into chorus 1 and chorus 2.

Let's clip-gain those up too, before they become a four-pack.

So, since it's two guitars becoming four, I'm going to turn them when it's only two guitars up, and see if it's sexy.

Sexyyy, baby! And now I'll take a quick peek at it.

- Good? - [Nik] Yeah.

- Let me just check it.

Okay, that helped us.

By doing that change, it actually takes one more thing for me to remember out of it, kind of does it automatically.

Some people are just, "Oh, let's compress it, and then it will come up." Well, just make it louder. It's easier.

So, since we're, like, modifying it, I always like to have guitar solos come up on two faders.

So, in this example, I think I will change the output of the solo.

Let's make the guitar solo come up on 11 and 12.

And let's just run it through my guitar plug-in.

So if there's a mono guitar solo on a song, I can run it right through my guitar plug-in, and literally, stock out the box, it's kind of automatically applied.

I'll play the solo section now.

So what we're going to do is we're going to show you the difference now, okay? So that's giving it a little bit of love, some EQ, some compression, some reverb, some delay.

So we'll do that one more time for you.

You know, these are just signature plug-ins, they give you a taste of everything.

So, it's just what I like, so I created these with sounds I like, so this is what I would go to on the solo.

If the guitars are all stereo pairs, and there's a guitar solo, why not have that come up a stereo pair, because you have the same level.

This way, if your faders are at zero for your main guitars, then your solo could be at zero for a stereo pair, and then you can put a stereo effect on it.