So I've broken down the tools that we use in about basically 10 different categories. And they can be within the fixing kind of category and also the creative category. Some are completely in the overlap area like EQ, for example, EQ can be used for fixing things like fixing a nicely quality or you can use it completely creative like automating a low pass filter or something like that to get some really cool effects. So all of these tools can be either in the fixing mode or the creative mode, and we'll kind of go through them one at a time. The most basic one, right, the beginning is the balance and pan just your fader and also your left and right balance. Then we go through to EQ, we'll go through all the different types of EQ that we have compression, then gates, then harmonics and distortion.

I'll put this in here. There are various harmonics generators and also you can use can use compression to throw off harmonics if you really crush signals so that you know distortion is normally not a good thing in recording. But as of late, we've been really getting in some some interesting things when you really start crushing and doing parallel compression and things like that and setting up crash buses. We'll talk all about that in a little while. Then we have transient processes, which allow you to adjust the transients from you know, speed up the attack or slow down the attack, we'll get right into those delays in in just select some ping pong delays, certain delays that fall on musical divisions, all that kind of stuff, or even just slap delays. We'll get into that also reverb loop we'll look at reverb tails, a pre delays, all that kind of stuff.

And then limiters a great thing to do at the end of your mix is slap a limiter on there so that you won't go on Look into the red, there's a lot of additive stuff that can go on in a mix and without a limit that sometimes you can you either go into the red or you get so shy away from being in the red and you kind of miss out on some of your dynamic range right there. And then we'll get into all the editing tools as well. Okay, let's start out with the most basic one, which is all of your faders and all of your pan pots. Now, here in reason, I mean all your faders are very, very easy to move around in terms of the pan pots, some of these if they are mono channels, then you always have a mono left and right.

If it is a stereo channel, you can adjust the width of that and you can see that designated in or reflected in the width of that stereo control from being not so wide to be extremely wide and then that will move the bias of those stereo the left Right to the right or to the left, and then just check out some of your modifier keys. because quite often, if you say click, I think if you click on command, you can bring things back to their default position. So if you start moving some fans around, you want to get it back, just hold down Command, and then that will bring it back to the the default position. Now, over in Pro Tools, it's basically exactly the same thing. If it's a mono channel, you'll have one pan pot, if it's a stereo channel, you can change the kind of bias to being more to the right or maybe more, to the left here.

Again, just check your key board mana modifiers in a lot of da W's if you want more finer controls, so you can see I'm just grabbing this and moving up all the way up and down. in Pro Tools, I believe if you hold down Command, then you can see it takes a lot more movement to have the mouse to move that very minute. So if you just want to duck something down, just you know a couple of DBS like that, just hold down Command, and then just check out the monitor the key keyboard monitors, sorry, keyboard modifiers on your particular da W, if you want more finer control here, in terms of EQ, it's pretty easy on logic, you just click on this EQ of a particular channel you want and then you can go through various factory presets. So say if drums, you wanted to do a punchy kick or something like that, then you can see that's taken some of the boxes out of there and added some of the beta right there.

And then you can obviously change anything you like from there. So that's how you do it on logic on Pro Tools, then you would just bring that in on sorry, not the, the cents on the insert here, the EQ and then you would bring this EQ right in here and you can make your changes there. There's also factory presets there, then over on reason Here's how you do it. There's actually dedicated EQ right here on the, on the front panel of the, of the mixer. This is based around an SSL console, really nice. EQ is a great little thing on here as well, we'll start off with a kick drum.

So let's go across here. If you click on this, this will show you a spectrum analyzer of just that kick drum. And then you can adjust any of your EQ points right here. And you can see that if I was to bump this up, you can see it reflected on the diagram. And actually, they both work together, you see this knob moves the screen, and then also this screen moves those knobs as well. So it's a very quick way of, you know, setting up high pass filters, low pass filters, and any other EQ you like we'll look at all of this in a moment.

But that's kind of the quick and dirty way of getting to your EQ and various da W's Okay, for the most part, when we're dealing with compresses, you normally use them across inserts, in this case here, you can, we'll look at this a little bit later on, set them up on sins, or sins, so that you can really set up parallel compression and set up what I would call kind of a crash bass, where you can maybe take a bunch of vocals across here, and then you could also send them to a common compressor and this really, really crush that to kind of throw off some nice harmonics and beef up some of your vocals. Now in terms of the actual compressors, most of them will be threshold based. In other words, you lower the boom of that threshold, then anything above that will be reduced by a ratio, say a two to one ratio, or, you know, six to one, five to one, anything like that with attack and release.

You can turn it into more of a limiter that when you start getting into the extremes, I would say no Anything over about 10 to one I that ends up being kind of like a limiter. But so this is the threshold base one. Here's another version. Some of these are fixed threshold. There's no your lacrosse here. There's no threshold setting here, but you actually drive your input into the compressor.

And then you'll start seeing some gain reduction here. Just note that the ratio in this case is that with push buttons rather than a rotary control, it looks very, very similar over here in logic, you have some of the in built ones here. Here's ones, here's one sent a set up by waves. Reason is a little bit different. You can set up your insert effects right here, but you'll notice here's why I really love working in the reason mixer is that because it's modeled after an SSL console that has built in compressors and gates, look at this top check section up here. Every channel has got a pretty hefty compressor and Also a gate.

So you know what I like about that is you can really look, you can see all the gang redactions right here. So you can see which has been kind of crushed more than others. So this looks like a very busy screen. But what I like about it is most of the compression and gating can be done right here on the screen, all of your EQ you can kind of look at, so it just seems to be kind of a good way to look at things. Again, if you're missing half of this, don't worry about it. We'll look at it in detail when we actually start doing some mixing.

In terms of gates, they're very much like compressors, you'd normally want to set them across inserts here. Here's a waves example. And here's some of the inbuilt one that's in Pro Tools. Logic, it's going to look very, very similar. Here's a waves one, here's a built in one. And then like I said, in reason you actually have built in gates right across every channel of your mixer.

There are things called transients shape isn't alone. These things you could probably do with a compressor, but it's they're normally just a few knobs here that can do a lot of very cool things I just muted, sorry, sewed up this guitar. So it's just a standard rhythm guitar, just a little $500 Fender tele. And what I'm going to do is mess around with the attack, listen to the transients of this, this track as I'm adjusting these, the attack and the sustain. So if you wouldn't have that guitar just kind of pop out of your mix a little bit more. You can accentuate just the beginning of that or the other way you could really mellow that attack out.

Check it out. And for example, you can also tell off that sustain so it's almost like a palm mute. So trading stripe is that great for percussive things like rhythm guitars, snare drum Tom's I love them on times if you just want to have the the attack of the toms to come through trend shapers are a great way to do it. In terms of delays and reverbs are normally set them up on that's a pretty typical thing to do is to put them on effect sense because you just basically want to place all of your instruments in varying amounts in the same kind of environment in things like plates rooms, you could have a hole there slapback echo and also time delays in terms of you know, April So three sixteenths, anything you like. Now limiting is basically a compressor with a very, very high ratio.

And here's where you typically want to put them. It's great to put them over your master buss if you have various instruments buss together. So for example, I have a kick, snare and hi hat, and they're all going out to bass number one and two, which is being fed into this drum buss. And so if I play this, we can start bringing down that threshold and you'll start seeing this attenuation you can also see it over here as well. And if you wish, you can give yourself a little bit of a ceiling on that as well. not use it drastically, you can get a lot more tightness, but sometimes it's really good just to give yourself some metering protection here so that you don't get into the red Even if that happens very quickly, just keep an eye on your meters here quite often most da W's the little peak will stay on, you can just reset that, if you wish.

But Limited is a great thing to put across buses and also you master left and right bus. Then of course, there's all the editing tools that are available in any da W. So for example, I've soldered up the lead vocal here, let's focus on the top. lead vocal comes in about here. Sure enough, there's a cough there, I can just snap that back. And even if I take that snap off, I could nudge that right up to the beginning. Perhaps I just want to keep my intake breath there to keep it a little bit more realistic.

And then if I like I can go to all these drums. This is these are all the live tracks. There's no live drums until the first chorus comes in. So you just snap them all up. You can also do things like cleaning up your Timing on some of these audio tracks. Now I had this Uh, sorry, this electric guitar this guitar part solid up and I brought up the clip so you can hear in time, kind of slow down.

And that part is definitely late. So in a lot of da W's, you can actually time all these transients here. You can see I'm late on that part there. Go through some of these that obviously needs to be brought up. You can go as heavy as you want in this in this area, my experience is not to just select them all and then quantize them, but just get the parts that are really obviously late or early and just give them a little bit of a nudge. And let's see how that sounds.

It's a little bit late there. You can get the idea. You can change your timing of these transients on any audio track. And of course, they're if they're MIDI tracks, you can nudge those MIDI notes around as well. Then, of course, in most modern doors, you can also change the pitch and the vibrato. So let's look at this particular note right here.

Yeah, there's some vibrato right there. I can flatten that right out. So it's more of a pure time. Yeah. And then of course, I can change that time to anything I want. Yeah, I'm just so I mean, there's lots of things you can do on a typical da w in terms of editing, with your timing with your pitch, chopping, little pieces out, copying and pasting, all that kind of stuff.

And we'll look at that in detail when we get into actual practical examples event mixing.