Original subtitles

Hi! This is Alan Meyerson, coming to you from Mix With The Masters

with a little video about how to get a little bit more impact on our percussion.

So I have a piece of music here from Gears of War called "Raid Action."

It's the first piece in the game,

and I'll play a little bit of it.

So let's take a look at the percussive percussion,

which actually sounds pretty darn good already,

see what could we do if we wanted to get a little bit more out of it.

Well, the first thing I'm going to do

is actually something that my friend Andrew Scheps is a big fan of,

and that's to do a little bit of parallel compression.

And Andrew is a big believer in not compressing individual elements

and compressing the overall mix.

And in the world of pop music, you can do that.

It's much, much harder to do that in music for media,

like in film music or in video game music,

because we're delivering separate elements

and you can't really have a general compressor over everything.

Even if you can, which technically you can,

it would sound really weird if they wanted to use one stem

and the threshold is being controlled by,

say, a piece of percussion that isn't there in that stem or so on and so forth.

But what you can do is you could do stuff over the entire stem

and sort of congeal the whole stem together.

So let's think like we have a really long beard,

and we're Andrew,

and let's see what it sounds like

if I add a little bit of parallel compression to this drum figure.

So we've got a really nice parallel thing there,

so I'm going to try adding

a little bit of the Chris Lord-Alge 1176

in addition to a little bit of a...

It's engineer day,

a little bit of the JJP PuigTec,

some little bit of top end from that.

Let's see what happens if I blend in a little bit of that.

See if we get a little snap out of it from it.

Nice, right?

It's doing a nice job.

So I like that. So now, let's see if, without creating a latency issue,

which we could possibly have,

if I can add to it something that I like very much.

And if it doesn't work here, we'll use it in a different place,

which is the PSP Vintage Warmer 2.

I like getting my snap out of this plug-in.

Let's see if it works.

Yeah!

So that's really, really great.

So we're getting there.

Where else can we get a little bit?

Well, we have an Aux bus that everything is going through

that we already have processing on on it.

So let's see what we're doing there.

We have a compressor on there

which has got a pretty fast...

I don't quite want to hit it as hard as that.

I like that.

And now we have this plug-in called the Oxford Envolution,

which is...

it's a transient designer,

one of many transient designers out there,

but it has a really, really good sensitivity,

a really good threshold where it can really grab

the internal transients in there

a little bit better than some of the other ones can.

And it also gives me the ability to tweak the sustain a little bit.

So, let's go a little bit over the top and see what that gets us.

There you go.

So it's adding a nice amount of attack,

and I'm cutting it on the Sustain a little bit,

but it's a little bit processed-sounding to me like that.

So now what I'm going to do is just mix in a tiny bit of it.

So that's pretty punchy.

So now, if we...

...compare it to where we were...

Good sound,

but...

Really good.

Getting there. Now, just give it a quick listen.

Listen to individual elements and see if there's anything to be added.

This guy is good. I'm still hearing a bit of a...

of a frequency in there I don't like.

Right about there,

that's taking away a little bit of the snappiness of it.

Right.

So when we go from that...

It adds quite a bit of nice snap to it.

And there you have it.

A way to get some more snap,

more impact out of your percussion,

a little bit of top end, a little bit of transient modulation,

a little bit of parallel compression

with the possibility of adding just a, you know, a bit of a harmonic...

the PSP or anything like it.

The Lo-Fi would work in a situation like that,

your favorite... the Decapitator might work, or not.

That's sort of a bonus thing, see whether that helps or not,

it won't always help,

but it certainly sounds like it has more impact now.

And as long as you use it carefully and don't overuse it,

I have this thing I call the 20% rule:

I always set it to where I think it sounds good, and then I back it off 20%,

and 99% of the time that's better.

So thank you very much for your time.