All language subtitles for 01. Percussion_EN

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.