Original subtitles

Let's kick things off with looking at some saturation using the Soundtoys

bundle. Now we're going to be working on this track Marry Me, which is kind of a

country rock style track. Let's give it a quick blast.

Standing up in a funeral for a friend.

It's all come on right back again.

I know she don't want to marry him.

He's not her lover, he's not a friend.

Thank you.

Okay, so you get the picture.

So everything sounds good, kind of in a nice place, got a nice warm feel to it.

If anything, it maybe sounds a little bit too, I'd say kind of lumpy almost,

kind of low -mid dense. So a lot of elements that have kind of lots of low

information, which are clattering slightly.

So let's have a look at altering that.

Now what we're going to be looking at is a process known as saturation or

overdrive, distortion.

Now this is an essential mixing skill to nail, it really is.

Now we're going to apply it in this case to enable us to try and bring some of

these sounds out of the mix, bring them forward a little bit and help to kind of

disentangle some of the low mid areas. So let's start off with this acoustic

guitar. So I'm going to load up Decapitator. Now this is Sound Toys'

saturation overdrive distortion module now i like to use saturation a lot of

time to try and almost rebalance the sound or balance the sound in the same

you would do eq in a way but this is different to eq because we're actually

adding harmonics that aren't already there so it's very powerful and you can

actually use it in conjunction with eq to get the best of both worlds so let's

have a listen to the acoustic guitar and solo just briefly

So what I want to do is bring out some of the top of the guitar and just hold

back some of the low mid. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to do a kind of

parallel saturation technique. So I'm going to bring up the drive.

I'm going to bring up the low cut.

And I'm going to brighten the tone, but I'm going to do this in parallel. So

we're going to keep the original sound as it is, but we're going to mix in this

kind of overdriven sound alongside it.

Now I'm doing this in solo so you can really hear it, but what I need to do is

do it in the context of the mix.

So what you want to focus on is the way that the guitar comes out a little bit

from the mix, but also it helps to push it up in the speaker. So it's pushing it

away from the piano, the low mid of the vocal, the organ, also the bass.

It's kind of raising it above those sounds so you might have to shut your

really focus and you'll be able to hear it.

Now in solo, this acoustic guitar might have lost something. It's lost some of

that low mid richness it had before, but we must have a holistic approach to

mixing. So it's how each individual sound adds up to create the whole that's

important, not how each sound works in isolation.

Okay, let's have a look at some of the other sounds. So let's jump onto the

organ sounds.

So my thought process is going to be a little bit similar.

Going to try and just kind of free up a little bit of that low mitt.

I'll try a different style this time.

We'll be right

back.

So again I think we're freeing up a little bit of that low mid again.

And just slightly rebalancing the organ so it's got a little bit more

information in the higher frequencies. Just trying to clear away some of the

and disperse some of the frequencies in other areas.

Again, there's a lot going on in the low mids on this slide guitar.

maybe it's interfering a little bit with the vocal in that respect so let's

again try a similar kind of technique

Okay, so let's just make sure we're doing good things.

And let's just bypass all three of them and then bring them in.

Okay, it's subtle, but it's definitely different and to my ears definitely

better. We could kind of tweak this and spend a lot of time getting it exactly

right, but it definitely is improving using those sounds. So we're kind of

unclogging that low -mid, bringing things out a little bit and helping to

little spaces in the frequency range for different sounds.

Okay, so let's go to our drum overheads.

Okay, let's try and bring these out a little bit. So I'm going to go to Devil

Lock Gelux, which is kind of an extreme compressor limiter. So you can just

mangle sounds with this as you're going to hear.

Let's just solo it for a second.

Okay, so let's just bring this in Paolo again.

We'll be right back.

Okay, so I'm trying to get that exactly right, just get it dialed in. So adding,

you know, life to the drums but not creating too much kind of sustain and

much information and those cymbals getting too squashed so i just want it

a kind of subtle effect

okay

i'll

leave that on so finally for this saturation on this track let's have a

the piano

So I just want to really drive home the point here. So let's get Decapitate on

again. So what we can do with this, especially if we're doing it in parallel

using the low cut and high cut, we can create the kind of areas of frequency

density in the sound.

And these are areas that we want to bring out. We've also got the tone

to make it dark or bright. So let's just follow this for a second and I'll

demonstrate what I mean.

So we can create kind of driven harmonics in different areas of the

range. And obviously when we do this in parallel, we can create little pockets

of frequency density to bring the sound out in the area we wanted to bring it

out. So let's try something again similar, just a little bit of a low cut

just brighten it up a little bit in parallel.

Just trying to bring a bit of life to it. It's like harmonic excitation

essentially, just adding frequencies that weren't originally present to try

bring some kind of life and vibe into the sound.

So I don't want it to start breaking up.

Okay, so let's try this in the mix.

okay again just clears up a little bit of space in that low mid area so let's

just take all this processing out

Okay, so you can hear that we've added quite a lot of life to this mix.

Things are jumping out a little bit more from the speakers.

So that's one of the uses of saturation to bring life to the sound to add extra

harmonics and help lift the mix and make things come out of the speakers at you.

Next up we're going to jump over to a dance track and we're going to have a

at another use of saturation to help us squeeze more level into our sounds and

get more RMS out of sounds at the expense of taming the transient.

So I'll see you in the next video. Thanks for watching.