Mixing Piano and Rhodes with David Glenn [Excerpt]

• Report rights infringement
• published: 24 Jul 2016
• views: 3182

http://bit.ly/mixacademy // An excerpt from July 2016 at The Mix Academy on mixing piano and rhodes. Watch David Glenn mix the song from start to finish: http://bit.ly/mixacademy — Transcript: Hey, what's up guys? David Glenn back for The Pro Audio Files and davidglennrecording.com. Today's video is an excerpt from my membership site. It's called The Mix Academy. You may have heard of it. You can go to themixacademy.com right now and I've got a $1 trial. It gets you 30 days in the site. Multi-tracks that you can download, practice your mixing, follow me start to finish tutorials, mix the song, add it to your resume. We've got a private community, all kinds of great stuff happening in there, and a new feature is what I'm calling interactive mix critiques. Members are going to be able to send me their mixes, we're going to filter through and pick several of them every month, and I'm going to import them into Pro Tools, and it's not going to just be, “Hey, pull your kick up, pull your snare,” little things like that. Of course that'll be involved, but if I hear something in the low end that I would do different, I'm going to get down there and I'm going to show you — I'm going to open up plug-ins and kind of feature a couple of techniques and things for each of the mixes that get selected. So some really cool stuff happening over there. $1 gets you in. themixacademy.com. We'll put a link in the description below. Moving on into today's video, this is straight from The Mix Academy, and I hope you enjoy it. Thanks again! Let's talk about this piano here. I've got an SSL, I warmed it up like crazy. 150 is boosted and top on it, compressed the snot out of this guy. I used a compressor I haven't used before, we'll show that in a second, but here is the before... [piano, before] Pretty good piano sound for — it just has a little bit of that top end thing, but since we took the top end out, this is important. Because I found that 3-5 kHz, that mid-range thing that I've been talking about all of this video, because we dip that down on all the tracks, some of the tracks that may have sounded okay needed to be adjusted as well, because they needed now to compliment and be right mixed to feel better together as a whole, and so this is something with the piano, again, was trial and error from the direction that I originally had. Here's again before. [piano, before] [piano with EQ] Okay, so much fuller. Taking out that harsh... One more time, here's that back in. You can hear it, right? Just that right there. Softens it up. And then I compress the crap out of it with the McDSP. I don't even know what this is, a retro compressor. 4030. Here's no compression. [piano without compression] I felt like it was just pokey and it was sticking out for the licks. I wanted a little more sustain from the chords, and so compressing it. [piano with compression] Go back to the top of that. [piano] Brings out the chords more. Pushes down. Really, mostly it's pushing down the lick there. Okay, moving on, we've got another piano, another 2500 cycles that I just didn't care for. Then I automated this. We'll show that in a little bit. Then I felt like this one was a bit pokey, so I pulled back the attack and boosted sustain. Here's no processing. [electric piano without processing] There's that frequency coming out. [electric piano with EQ] Softens it up a bit, and then this guy, the Alloy 2 to take away the tingy attack of this part. [electric piano with iZotope Alloy 2] So instead of using a compressor to — with a fast attack and just smack it down, I used a transient designer and pulled the attack back. The EQ here — let me find — where did I automate that, I think it was at the soft section here. Okay, so this at the first verse, when this lick plays, I felt like it was — let me turn it off. You can hear it here. So fairly subtle, but... [mix] That you know, 1 to 3 kHz. I don't know, it's just — it's just like nothing except the vocal has that kind of presence and then this thing comes in and it just felt distracting, so I automated a Pro-Q 2 for just that section, and I pulled back 2.5 kHz a whole ton with a wide bell. So one more time, here is before this EQ... [mix, piano before EQ] Distracting, right? The left ear there. And now with this... [mix, piano with EQ] You just feel the music on the left side, you feel that lick instead of it being pokey and distracting. So that was a quick decision, and I rocked that. The Rhodes, I went much warmer than in my original mix. I boosted 150 15dB or so. Here is the Rhodes before any processing. [Rhodes, no processing] Yeah, the verse, that's a good place. [Rhodes, no processing] And then with the boost, you can see here, 150, 170, somewhere in there. 15dB. [Rhodes with EQ] Much warmer. [truncated]