Original subtitles

This is Matt Schaeffer in an undisclosed location in LA somewhere

with Mix With The Masters,

and we're going to talk about "All the Stars,"

by Kendrick Lamar and SZA from the Black Panther soundtrack.

I grew up here in LA.

I started working in a studio when I was about 15 years old,

I was an intern in Studio City.

From there I went to Berkeley, played guitar there,

but really wanted to study engineering.

I did engineering and film scoring, actually.

So it was pretty cool to work on Black Panther

because it's the first movie soundtrack I ever got to do.

All this stuff that you see at the top is basically production stuff

that came from Sounwave and another guy, Al Shux.

Basically, all that stuff was just programmed and sent in

and we do a lot of editing In The Box, so you can see

there are lots of edits and stuff.

But I didn't record any of that, it's all programmed material.

All the vocals and strings we recorded.

The synth loop from Al Shux, that's the top two tracks in the session.

Everything else basically we got at the same time.

I think we did the vocals to a 2-track of all the stuff dubbed down.

For the most part, we didn't do a lot of rearranging on this session.

It's possible we might have added eight bars somewhere in here for another hook,

but I can't really remember to be honest.

Some tracks we rearrange a lot, right up until the last minute.

And it's like a constant process where the entire song will be changing

right up until mastering, really,

sometimes even after it's mastered once or twice

we'll go back and rearrange things.

But this one all came together pretty easily,

so not a lot of rearrangement.

When I got the stems, I think they were in a Pro Tools session

except for the synth tracks.

There is usually a folder of audio files

but in this case Sounwave was producing

and he would usually send me a Pro Tools session.

Let's see, I don't know if I really have much of a philosophy

except that I think you should do what the artist wants.

Your vision might not be the same as what the artist wants

so I think it's important to try to stay within the artist's goal.

I don't really have a very strong opinion about

In The Box versus Out The Box either way.

So I'm pretty comfortable mixing In The Box.

We mixed this one at Interscope.

They have a couple of rooms there.

I think we might have started it downstairs

and moved upstairs towards the end of it.

The plug-ins are the same in both of those rooms

so it was kind of nice being able to bounce back and forth between two rooms

and have the sessions work.

I think on this one the structure was pretty much there.

The main thing that happened over the course of the song,

I think, was adding the string arrangement.

That would probably be the biggest change that happened

over the course of the production, but yeah,

there wasn't a whole lot of restructuring with this one.

I think when we were tracking the vocals we were working with the 2-track

and when you get the stems, a lot of the times

the gain is too high for mixing everything together as a multi-track.

So typically I start Clip Gaining everything down as a mix preparation.

There's enough headroom to mix everything together.

You can see it here, everything is basically -13, -14.

I wouldn't say there's really a specific number that I go for

as long as there's enough headroom.

But it's usually pretty low, something between -10 and -18,

something like that.

Sometimes I'll put metering on the mix bus.

It kind of depends on what the studio is calibrated at,

but typically -18 will be 0 VU analog

so I'll try to go for there.

I don't really have a peak number that I would shoot for

because typically you're looking at RMS on an analog meter.

If you set up an analog-style plug-in VU meter, go for 0 on that meter,

which is probably calibrated to -18 or -16, something like that.

VU, analog.

So that's kind of what I go for.

I'll Clip Gain all the stems down,

start bringing up the faders, and get a rough balance that way

and try and make everything hit around 0 VU.

I'll usually start with nothing, but I do have a few things

that I usually use, like on here, SSL G Compressor,

and usually a Pultec EQP-1A EQ on the mix bus.

Lately, I've been using more OXFORD INFLATOR.

It's like a saturation-type plug-in.

Blend in at wet and dry.

I tried, actually, Decapitator on the mix bus on this song,

it sounded pretty cool at first and then we mastered it once

and it was way too much.

Everything got mastered a couple times anyways,

so we had some room to mess with things.

This top track right here is where I print everything.

When I mix, I don't really have a set template.

I usually set up something similar to this,

it kind of depends on the track.

But In The Box I'll usually print stems inside of the session

as opposed to bouncing stems out.

It makes more sense to me that way because you can punch in on a region.

Then you can actually hear it in real-time instead of bouncing offline,

then you have to go back and listen to it again anyway

to make sure that there are no errors in the bounce,

so I print everything In The Box because of that.

And then just export everything later.

But yeah, this top track is my print track,

so everything down here is routed to some kind of aux,

some kind of sub-group, and then all of that stuff routes up.

This is where most of the auxes are and effects and all that stuff.

Routes out to the print track at the top,

first through this print bus and then to this print audio track.

Here's what I have for SSL.

Slow attack, fastest release, not really any make-up gain,

there might be a tiny bit, and then a Pultec EQ

boosting a little low and a little bit of top end.

Sometimes I'll go way more extreme with the top end boost

but this one didn't really need it so it's pretty subtle.

As long as you're leaving enough headroom, it's usually okay.

Any mastering engineer these days is going to be able to handle a loud signal.

They're used to everybody giving them really loud mixes.

But everything about this one is digital,

there was no analog stage because it's an all In The Box mix.

So as long as it stays digital, even if there is intersample clipping,

it doesn't really matter until the D/A stage.

So if you give an audio file to the mastering engineer

they're going to pull it down before it hits their D/A stage anyway.

It's really about managing headroom for yourself

so that you have room to turn things up or down.

These are console emulation plug-ins, and basically what you do

is put an instance on each track and then you can set up another one

on a bus track and it acts like a summing mixer on a console.

And you can choose different styles like this one that I have here,

I think, is the clone of an EMI console.

You can choose Neve or SSL.

I like this one because it has a cool low end bump to it.

I don't think I used it on everything.

Sometimes I'll put one on every channel

and then use the sub-groups that are on it.

You can go to the VCA tab and start pulling down, like,

if you have all your drums on one fader, and bass, synth, guitar, vocals, reverb,

all that stuff on the other ones.

It's like an extra layer of faders to use. So that's kind of nice.

You can turn stuff on or off, or you can overdrive certain channels.

I guess the nice thing about something like this

is if you load a separate instance,

each one is a clone of a different channel strip on a console,

so they're not all exactly the same.

Each one has slightly different characteristics

and they add together in a way that doesn't make everything sound the same.

So I guess if you're mixing all In The Box and you want an analog-type sound,

that's a good way to emulate it.

If you're looking for the sound of overdrive on a console

you can get close with this.

All right. The vocals, I guess we could start with the hook.

We went for a more robotic, futuristic sound

so we used the Little AlterBoy for some of that,

and then some of it was Izotope VocalSynth.

I have the track frozen so I can play the processed version for you by itself.

So that was the VocalSynth track

and then in parallel, this is basically the same thing,

it's just duplicated.

I just used the Formant shift on Little AlterBoy,

so together they sound like this.

So these all go to a hook bus where there's some bus processing.

I boosted some top, cut mids, cut some lows.

There's some compression.

A little more EQ, and then some MicroShift

for more chorus-y type effects.

Then the backgrounds.

There's some auto-panning to make it a little more interesting.

That part, when it's just up the center, it kind of sounds a little boring,

it's not really moving or doing anything.

So with the auto-pan on it just, I don't know,

makes it a little more interesting.

We got SZA's vocals.

I didn't really do that much except EQ and compression, reverb,

that's basically it.

There's some delay too.

Boosted a lot of top, around 16, with the Pultec,

with a pretty wide Q.

There's a lot of compression.

I like to use the 1176 on female pop vocals.

I don't know if I could really say why, I just think they sound good for that.

The setting is pretty typical.

A lot of people use a setting like this with a slower attack

and a fast release on the 1176.

But even with the slow attack,

it's still much faster than most compressors.

There's also an LA-2A in the chain with the limit setting

and emphasis on the high end.

Without compression, it sounds like this.

It's kind of hard to tell because it's not really level-matched.

I'm using the make-up gain on the LA-2A, but with it on...

So the 1176 is really the one that's doing most of the work,

and you can tell it gets around -7 to -10

at the second half of the hook when she gets really loud.

Even more at some places.

And then the LA-2A is just for a little extra smoothing out

and also for make-up gain.

I usually stack de-essers and set them to different frequencies.

It's like a multi-band compressor, almost.

A little more EQ where I actually cut some top end.

More de-essing, and then MicroShift.