Original subtitles

Hey there and welcome back for another mix.

This time we're going to be working on a track that's kind of a O electronic

track. There's ballad like elements in this

track and there's also dance like elements in this track.

So a lot of stuff for us to work on here.

This is by an artist called Twin Lights

guys named Shane and Morrow, producer duo and I actually worked on a track of

theirs for my mastering course mastering demystified when we did some mastering

from stems for them.

And this time we're going to be diving

into full mix.

Does my mic sound better?

In the original rough mix, we'll find out.

You let me know.

I think the original rough mix here is

really good. So we're going to be doing the same thing

that we've done in other tracks in this course.

We're going to start by listening to that rough mix and just getting a sense for

what are the things that we actually could or should improve on.

We don't necessarily have to reinvent the wheel on every mix we do, and we're not

going to do that here either.

In fact, I had these guys send me a

couple versions of the stuff they did their original mix using a whole bunch of

fancy proprietary.

Logins, but we're going to be doing our

mix using nothing but Ableton Live.

I'm doing this mix in Ableton Live.

I'm not an Ableton Live user.

I've actually never mixed anything

Ableton Live before.

I don't think I've even opened Ableton

Live in 10, almost 20 years since like I was back in college.

I use it like a few times, but I was able to open it up and apply the principles

that we've been talking about in this course using nothing but the stock

plugins in Ableton Live and I think kick up the mix a notch from where it was.

So again, the principles are so much more important.

And the tools.

When you're mixing this for yourself, you

can go in and use whatever fancy tools you want, just like they did for the

original mix. But for the sake of this course, I'm

using nothing but stock plugins here to show you that it can be done A and B so

that you could just download a trial version of Ableton Live and open up this

mix for yourself.

I had these guys send me some stems to

work from, as well as wet and dry tracks.

They just sent me their Ableton Live

session in the beginning, but there were just so many plugins on it that they were

already using that I said, hey guys, this is what we should probably do.

Why don't you send me just all of your wet tracks and all of your dry tracks and

I'll import the wet ones so I can kind of pick up in the mix where you left off and

then in situations where I really want to go back a tick because I'm not loving the

effects on it.

I'll be able to go into those dry tracks

and pull them in.

We actually end up having a little bit of

a problem there since it's a fairly dense session with a ton of tracks in it.

There was a couple of missing elements, and I could tell that when I started to

get into the mix, I just felt like the low end wasn't quite there in the same

way no matter what I was doing.

And I felt like we must be missing some

tracks here. So I had them send me stems, and when I

brought up the stems, things sounded much better.

Stems, in case you don't know, they are kind of like Prince of your buses, right?

So you'd have a print of all of your.

Bass tracks.

Rendered out, recorded as one stem, all of your guitar tracks, all of your

keyboard tracks, all of your lead vocal tracks printed out.

So instead of having sixty seventy eighty ninety tracks in the session, you have

the eight or 10 or 12 most essential buses kind of printed out.

So I went and brought in those stems and then went back to individual tracks where

I wanted to be able to refine things more than I could on the stems alone.

So you'll find a mix here of stems and.

Original individual tracks in here.

I'm actually going to show you right now on the screen here.

We've got a kick drum stem, a bass stem, and then this bass group that has a whole

bunch of bases in it.

I started working with these individual

bass tracks originally, but this is one of the elements where I found that

something was missing and it turns out they hadn't sent me this subtract.

So I brought in a the base stem and things were sounding pretty cool.

But I liked the tone I had gotten for the upper base stuff, so I ended up layering

their base stem with the base group that I had treated in.

The original mix right try to give things a shot, but they just weren't working

because I don't have all the right tracks.

We also have a stem for all of the snare drums.

I think there's some Tom fills on here and on this one I didn't really feel like

I had to go in there too much.

There is some automation on here from

section to section to give things a more even feel throughout.

We'll find again, there's a bunch of automation in this mix that's one of the

most important and most neglected things for new mixers is doing your automation

passes at the end.

We have a guitar group in here.

I wanted to adjust how the guitars were being panned and a little bit of EQ, so I

didn't use the stem there.

We've got a piano track by itself, a

string group. Again, I wanted to adjust things slightly

so I used individual tracks and there's this thing called the drop saw.

This is like a chorus synth, and I have that in here as a stem because again, I

think in the original drop saws when they had them track by track we were missing.