Rough mix - Pro Tools Tutorial

- [Instructor] Let's say you just finished tracking and you need a quick rough mix, but you really don't wanna spend a lot of time setting up effects to make it sound good. Here's a quick effects set up that almost always sounds great that will get you in the ballpark with very little effort. So the first thing we'll do is listen to the track with no effects, it's completely dry. ♪ It's amazing how good an apple tastes ♪ - [Instructor] It sounds pretty good because I spent some time getting my balances together for my rough mix. I didn't worry about effects, because I'm going to add them right now. The first thing we'll add is a delay, and we'll put just a standard medium delay up. And we're always gonna set it at exactly the same thing. For this trick we set it at 220 milliseconds, and then we add 10 to 20% feedback so we get two or three slaps. And here's what it sounds like when we added onto the vocal because that's what this delay is principally for, just vocals. ♪ It's amazing how good an apple tastes ♪ ♪ Sweet summer air after pouring rain ♪ ♪ The sun shining on my face ♪ - [Instructor] Already we got a little bit of a space around it. Just a little more ambience and a little bit of extra life. Now, the next thing we'll do is add a reverb. This is going to be a fairly short reverb. We'll add a de-verb here. What I'm going to do is set this to a plate, and then set it large, it doesn't matter, but I wanted a K-time of 1.2 seconds and a pre-delay of 20 milliseconds. Now again, these are the settings we're always going to use. You're never gonna vary from this, because these just tend to work. They're right in middle of the settings that just will always sound good. They won't sound great, they won't sound bad. They'll just sound good all the time. In this we're going to use just on the drums and percussion. So let's set this up, first of all, on the snare. So we'll set it up across the snare bus and the snare bus has both the high mic and the low mic on it. So, so what we're going to do is set this up on small plate, on the plates giving us 1.2 seconds of decay time. (upbeat drum music) And all we're doing is we're putting this in a space, making a it a little more interesting. So once I got that sound, I'm going to edit onto the tums as well. I'm just going to copy the settings right over, and let's listen to what we have on the drums. (upbeat drum music) So, that's pretty good, let's listen to the track. ♪ It's amazing how good an apple tastes ♪ ♪ The sweet summer air after pouring rain ♪ - [Instructor] Our third effect is going to be another reverb. We're going to use a different one. We're going to use an error reverb. It doesn't matter what you use because the settings are going to be pretty much the same all the time. We're going to use, in this case a hull, and you're going to set it at about 1.8 seconds. Pre-delay again at 20 milliseconds or so. Once again, these are sort of the magic frequencies to get in the ball park, and this effect you're going to use on everything else other than percussion and drums and vocals. So let's start out on the piano. (lively piano music) We have this, this is the large plate. (lively piano music) Now that we have that, we're going to copy it over onto the synthesizer and onto the guitars. We have a guitar bus here, a subgroup guitar subgroup, so I just copied over there so it gets on all the guitars. Now let's listen. ♪ It's amazing how good an apple tastes ♪ ♪ The sweet summer air after pouring rain ♪ ♪ The sun shining on my face ♪ - [Instructor] Now let's listen again, and I'm going to mute the effects as we go through it. Listen to the difference. ♪ It's amazing how good an apple tastes ♪ ♪ The sweet summer air after pouring rain ♪ ♪ The sun shining on my face ♪ ♪ I love the summer bells and children laughing ♪ ♪ The dizzy row which I get from dancing ♪ - [Instructor] Now what you'll do now is go through and tweak all these a little bit. Tweak the levels of the effects so they sit better in the mix, and then you're done. It's really easy, it's really fast and it's much faster than what I just showed you here, because I was going through each one and I was setting it up and I was talking as I was doing it. But you can do this literally in a couple of minutes. We set it up where you get it sounding good, and then you're done. And once again, it doesn't sound great. It doesn't sound bad but sort of right in the middle. It always sounds pretty good, so this is perfect for any kind of rough mix that you're doing because you know you'll always be in the ballpark. For an effect set up that seems to work on just about any rough mix, add a delay and set it to 220 milliseconds with the feedback set for a couple of repeats. Next, add a reverb and set the decay to around 1.2 seconds with a 20 millisecond pre-delay. Then, add a different sounding reverb has set the decay in this one to 1.8 seconds, also with the 20 millisecond delay. What you want to do is send the vocals to the delay. Send the drums to the short reverb with the 1.2 second decay and the rest of the instruments to the longer reverb with the 1.8 second decay.