SUM & DIFFERENCE MAKES A DIFFERENCE

I process all my drums using sum and difference rather than stereo. I use an SPL Gemini that does the conversion. I have a couple of old outboard items in this signal path and, initially, I think my motivation for processing in sum and difference was I didn’t know if I could totally trust that gear to process both the left and the right hand sides exactly the same. I didn’t want the left hand side to be half a dB louder, for example. So my entire drum bus signal path is sum and difference, including the SSL G compressor.

Sum and difference is a well known mastering processing technique but not used so much for mixing. The ‘sum’ information is everything that’s in phase, while the difference is what’s not in phase. For the type of music I work with, it’s especially helpful because the technique allows me to more heavily compress the in-phase, centre information, while allowing a reverb tail or a background vocal to have a much lighter touch. On the other hand, if I crush it all with a stereo compressor then I lose my depth in the sound stage, because I’m squeezing the decay time and bringing it up front. Sum and difference allows me to get maximum punch on the mono information while keeping the sides more open.

It’s just another technique that allows you to increase perceived loudness without destroying the depth of the mix. If you’re indiscriminately compressing everything, including reverb tails and HF elements of your mix, it makes your mix smaller and becomes more fatiguing to listen to. You may not even be able to hear 15kHz but if those frequencies are getting squeezed hard, then you feel tired listening to those songs over and over because there’s no dynamic range on the top end. That area is very sensitive to compression, in a bad way.

DRUMS: BOXING CLEVER

So now when I have the tone or the colour that I’m after, it’s going back in the box. Studio One is doing 90% of the work, but my drums really benefit from what I’m hearing through the analogue transformer saturation, the compression, and the EQ. But I’m making my listening decisions in the box. I’m listening to the Studio One session, post-conversion, back through my mastering console.

I think this is the difference in my approach versus an analogue engineer running channels up through an SSL, for example. I’m using my analogue gear as a ‘soft ceiling’, that I can push into from my DAW. Of course, I need high quality converters so I can trust the results coming out of my DAW. That said, I’m also often using the converters as another stage. I’ll intentionally clip my converter, just to shape the transients a little. That’s part of my sound and another reason why I’m making all my decision post my conversion.

STUDIO ONE: IN THE PIPELINE

Studio One’s Pipeline plug-in is what triggered me to switching DAWs after 16 years on Logic. It was in the middle of a weekend and I getting frustrated with Logic, battling with latency when I was trying to A/B a plug-in. I think Logic has fixed the problems with those functions now, but at the time it was messy. 

Someone told me about Studio One and Pipeline (I think it was Steven Slate, actually) and I guess I was desperate enough to give it a go. I wasn’t looking to switch DAWs. The other big ah-ha moment was seeing that I could work with 32-bit floating point files, while at the time Logic wouldn’t let me import 32-bit files, you’d have to down-convert to 24-bit. As I got to know Studio One, the more I was impressed. For about three months or so, I was working on Logic with my daily mixes while continuing to experiment with Studio One. The way it integrated with my analogue gear ended up winning me over.

The interesting fact is with Pipeline you can parallel a piece of gear with the plug-in, all in perfect phase alignment. I can do automation on the mix knob. In fact, you can take a photo and then drop that photo on the plug in when you open a session and it’ll emulate the photo settings in the hardware. So that’s why I was hooked.

VCA MIX TIPS

I do a lot of VCA automation in Studio One. The aim is to trigger my analogue compression and saturation differently for different parts of the song. For example, I want to keep the verses very dynamic. So in the verses I’ll pull back the VCA and let my analogue gear breathe a little more, less pushing. And then I hit in my chorus with more level. Again, there are knock-on and compound effects down the signal path by making small VCA moves.

WIDTH

If you mix wide — where you’ve got a stereo widening processor on everything that’s not mono — then it’s not going to sound wide after about 30 seconds, because now everything is so out of phase that you don’t feel it being wide. To me, it’s all about contrast. It’s like watching a black and white movie, and you get a flash of red and yellow. The contrast is striking. If everything is pumping red and yellow the whole time, you zone out. Which is why I stay extremely mono on drums, but then I do something like a ‘tree’ effect, where stereo element open up and out using chords and synths, growing wider… then close again. It’s more like a dynamic approach to stereo instead of a static super wide approach that loses its impact. 

808 SECRETS

Nailing the kick drum sub sound, the 808, can be really frustrating. Producers commit to a sound when I get to hear it and often it’s produced in studios that can’t accurately reproduce what the 808 is actually doing. I see a few common mistakes. One is tuning the 808 in the wrong key. Or the 808 is tuned too low. If its fundamental is at 30 or 38Hz then there’s not enough low-mid information for it to translate on smaller speakers. So I recommend you pick the right key — that’s the most important element.

I previously mentioned a few other tips about dealing with the 808, but I’ll finish off with a well known example.

There was a track called ‘Turn Down For What’ (2015) for DJ Snake and Lil John and everyone was just raving about my processing on the 808. The sound of the 808 was literally a multi-band compressor saturating the second octave only. So you have the attack of the 808, let’s say, 55 or 60Hz, which I leave alone, completely clean. That’s the sine wave component, and I don’t want to change its texture — I’m not going to turn it into a saw tooth or triangle. But an octave higher than that, with the tail, then I start to saturate that part. It means you can hear the 808 envelope on small laptop speakers, but you retain the bottom-end clarity — you get a clean envelope of the sine wave on the first octave under the kick.

AT: What was your answer?

TH: My assistant Hamish Patrick and I worked pretty hard at this and we found another approach in Pro Tools. This is the real benefit of working entirely in the box: we could import the entire stereo session to the top half of a brand new session and then import all the mixed stems to the bottom half. This meant I could start with the stereo mix in the front speakers and then take something like a synth part, mute it in the stereo mix part of the session and unmute it in the stems section and move the synth out into the room.

Usually what I found would happen is that the majority of the power of the mix needed to come from the left/right front speakers. Those principal, strong and transient-heavy, left and the right sounds are usually the drums, bass, maybe a guitar or something, and definitely the vocal. Those three things in particular. Coincidentally, those three things (drums, bass and vocals) tend to always be the things that drive the mix buss the hardest. So I could mute 80% of the stereo mix and just keep the drums, bass and vocals in there and still feel like I had the energy of the buss processing keeping the mix glued together.

AT: Right, so you keep the bedrock of drums, bass, and vocals then work up and outwards from there.

TH: That’s right. With those key elements in place, I had the freedom to play with all the other more atmospheric elements — the Felivand record has plenty of those. Atmos mixing lends itself to that stuff really nicely. At some points there might be four or five reverbs that I can carefully place in the room.

Typically I might leave the vocal completely dry in the front speakers, but then I’ll have the shorter room reverbs slightly back. Then as the space goes further back behind me, I might have a plate reverb there, and the hall reverb at the very back.

Working like this really helped unlock things for me. Rather than just doing the individual stems, with it feeling a little less glued together, I felt like I could maintain the integrity of the stereo mix and the energy of the bass slamming with the drums and the vocal and any other key elements, but I got all the benefits of the spatial stuff when I needed to. So that’s one of my key learnings.

Another benefit of working like this is that I’ve already made all my EQ and compression decisions in the stereo mix. I didn’t need to buy a big Atmos system because I’m mixing on larger ATC SCM50s for the stereo mixes. I can rely on those monitors and I know I’ve made the right tonal and compression decisions. Then I’m mainly using the other speakers for the panning. I might add some reverbs and other creative atmospheres, but for the most part I’m moving things around and using the space.

AT: There are many benefits to having the same mixer do the Atmos mix as opposed to someone else taking over and rebuilding it.

TH: Yeah, exactly. For me it’s less about being precious about my stereo mix, but more that I already know if an artist is going to want more reverb on their vocal. I know because I’ve already gone through the revisions on the stereo mix whether they’re ambitious enough to have everything mixed at the back of the room. That part makes it invaluable. I heard a lot of stories of it going to other people and there would be a lot of revisions. For me, to this point, I’ve only had one revision on an Atmos mix. I don’t do these mixes for other people’s projects. That wasn’t the reason I got into it. I just wanted to do it on my own mixes. I can make calls on things that I know everyone will be happy with and I won’t be in ‘revision land’ forever.

MIXING AT SCALE

AT: What’s the hardest part of Atmos mixing?

TH: The best, but trickiest aspect of Atmos, is that the format is scalable. So the idea is that if I mix in 7.1.4 it can get played back in a 9.2.4 room, or a 5.1 room or a 2.0 room or headphones (which is known more formally as binaural). The idea is you have one mix and it will algorithmically up-mix or down-mix, while doing its best to maintain relative positions and balances made in the original layout. In surround sound, it was a specific speaker setup, whereas Atmos is really an algorithmic fold-down, fold-up thing, unlike when you did the big cinema mix, then you did the 5.1 mix, then the stereo mix for good measure. You don’t have to do that anymore and I think that’s where things get interesting.

Pulling a good sound in the room isn’t hard, but folding down to the headphones is really the challenging part, in my opinion. Getting it to really translate in the headphones is quite tricky because the idea with the binaural is that it’s trying to emulate the experience you get in a speaker environment. The algorithm gets updated and is always being improved but there are certain things about it that are harder to balance against the speakers.

AT: So the binaural is a set of Dolby algorithms?

TH: Yeah. So this is a Dolby thing and all the depth and placement parameters have a bit of a sound to them as well. When I first started mixing Atmos I couldn’t really hear it in the headphones. Now I can hear it pretty well, but getting those settings right took a while. I would say I spend 60-70% in headphones to get them right. I get it working really well in the speakers and then I’m constantly going between the headphones and the Airpod Maxes which do all the spatial audio stuff too. I check on those as well because that’s the way a lot of people are consuming Atmos. If they have Apple Music it’s likely they’ll have a pair of headphones equipped with it.

AT: It sounds tweaky.

TH: It’s a very technical format at the moment. The workflow isn’t straightforward but getting easier as enhancements flow through. We’re all accustomed to checking a stereo mix in the car, then taking what you heard back into the studio for some tweaks. Often you might reach an impasse: ‘do I make it sound better in the car or the studio?’. You’re constantly straddling that line. What’s the compromise here? In the same way, I’ve had Atmos sound amazing in the speakers, and then I put the headphones on and certain elements really pop out in the binaural mix — ‘Wow, who put reverb on the whole mix?!’. So it’s a bit of a compromise at the moment.

AT: What’s your approach to quality control with the artist?

TH: With Felivand, she’s in Australia and I’m in my studio in LA. She can’t come into my studio and listen to the atmospherics. She would have to rent out a room in Australia and that costs money. And so the headphone thing is really important because she can listen to renders of the binaural versions.

On Apple Music you currently toggle Atmos on or off. It’s what Apple terms Spatial Audio and it’s pretty good. You can switch between mixes on your iPhone and you’ll hear the differences, some a bit more surprising than others.

It’s kind of the Wild West out there at the moment in terms of how the DSPs work with it. Tidal has it. Amazon music has it. Spotify is yet to adopt it and a lot of people are watching to see how that goes but Apple certainly is doubling down on Atmos. Even that is a moving target because the way Apple Music sounds today is different to how it sounded a year ago. I guess they’re taking the feedback of listeners, engineers and trying to incorporate that into the codec. So it’s tricky. It really is tricky.

REGRETS?

AT: Now that Atmos is gaining a bit more momentum, are you happy you took the plunge and got involved?

TH: It was definitely worthwhile and I’m genuinely glad I did it. Any opportunity to upskill in audio is worthwhile. Even though it was a fairly big outlay, I knew it would be a missed opportunity not to do it, and it’s now paid for itself. Labels and managers don’t want to have to ask to get the stems and then send them to some other guy for the Atmos mix — that’s a really big thing right there. You’re always trying to find those one-percenters that make you stand out as somebody people want to go to. I’m always looking for that. This is the first time in a long, long time that there’s been a lot of investment by big companies into the audio engineering side of music, and because this format is scalable, it still has the momentum.

I know the Dolby folk really well. They were really helpful to me setting up my room. Ceri Thomas, who now works at Apple, is a great guy and it’s been really cool getting to know those people and hear how they think about the format. We’ll see where it goes.

I really don’t know what the longevity of it all is, but I think it’s very safe to say that some version of this is here to stay purely with all the VR gaming possibilities. It’s got to somehow stick around.

MONITORING IN MIXLAND

Ernster conducts all his mixes in his Mixland studio in LA. At this point one would expect a straightforward description of his studio, but for some reason his mix environment changes continuously. Early in the pandemic he could be found mixing in an Airbnb with sea view, using a laptop and a headset. He later on mixed ‘Woman’ in his bedroom. He has also moved house several times in recent years, which means that he has built several incarnations of Mixland.

In addition, the studio’s design itself is rather out of the ordinary, with Ernster preferring to mix with a keyboard and track pad in his lap, so he does not have to deal with the reflections that come from an office desk. He also has built tons of tube traps, to create close to dead acoustics around his monitors, while the rear of his current studio is treated with less absorption, resulting in a live-end-dead-end room.

“I built all of these big, 27 inch diameter absorption tubes,” explains Ernster. “They are copies of the Isothermal ASC Attack Wall tube traps, with a vented design where they take the sound in, and convert the energy into heat so it just dissipates. It leaves the room very accurate. I built them for my previous studio, and when we moved house I just brought all the tubes to this place. I want the area around the speakers to be completely anechoic, just loaded into the wall, with no resonance. It is like I am sitting in a hi-fi room, just me and the speakers and the power amps on the floor. It is incredible for translation. I hear exactly what clients send me.”

“I have a PDF guide for anybody who is interested in making these tube traps on my Mixland website, on which we also offer plugins, and other nerdy stuff. Right now we’re working on a DIY guide for Yamaha NS10 modification. The NS10 modification consists of updated crossovers, which cost about $70 per pair. The mod is a more thoughtful design with better components and a better placed crossover.”

“The cheap crossover they originally put in results in a horrendous overlap and a big bump around 1.6kHz. This mod alleviates that, but the speakers still sound like NS10s: fast with great micro-dynamics. They are just a little more useful without that snarly, harsh mid-range. The mod also extends the top and the low end. When I place the NS10s closer together, they go down to 40Hz, because the low end couples. These days, a lot of cats working with NS10s use them in a boombox configuration, i.e. very closely together.”

“I mixed ‘Woman,’ on un-modded NS10s in a temporary studio within a tiny bedroom, with some acoustic treatment. I currently still mix on NS10s, and also on my Strauss SE‑MF‑4 monitors. I now have 16 NS10s in my studio, because I am building an Atmos setup! I have an old Apogee Symphony as my I/O, and hope to upgrade to the Symphony Mk II soon. I also have the Grace M905 monitor controller and a whole bunch of other gear that I don’t use when I mix. When I did the ‘Woman’ mix in my bedroom I was using the Crane Song Solaris DAC.”

SESSION PREP

Ernster mixed ‘Woman’ in May 2021, and explains that his process involves one of his two assistants prepping the sessions. “I had an assistant, Noah ‘Mix Giant’ Glassman, who played a large role in helping to prep this song. He has experienced a lot of success from working on this. In general, the assistant will make a new session with my template, and then he imports all the session data from the session that is sent to us.”

“With ‘Woman,’ we retained their settings, master bus, and I/O, everything, and my template lives in there just in case I need it. I have a bunch of  auxiliaries that give me really quick options, like if I need a slapback on the vocal I can really quickly reach for it. So I used most of what they had, added my own treatments, and I built my own master bus.”

“My assistant’s job is to colour code and lay everything out in the session, and he also lines up the reference mix, using the ADPTR Metric AB plugin, and listens measure by measure, section by section, all the way through the song, to ensure that the song in the session is playing back exactly the same as the approved reference bounce. If anything sounds remotely different, we call the engineer or producer and we politely request correct files. But in this scenario everything sounded great and was perfect.”

NO SOLO

Unusually, Ernster mixed ‘Woman’ with his assistant virtually looking over his shoulder. “He was present via Zoom and AudioMovers, because pandemic numbers were high. Generally, I mix on my own, but in this scenario, because it was a big mix and a big opportunity, and he was trying to absorb as much information as possible, he watched me mix and of course commented sometimes. It was fun to have a co-pilot.”

“My mix process is primarily comprised of listening to everything at the same time. I will solo when I really need to focus on something, but in this day and age mixes are very loud and glued together at the mix bus, and when you are hearing the kick in the mix, you are not hearing the way it is EQ-ed, you hearing the kick rub against everything else, grinding into saturation plug-ins, with several decibels of gain reduction and clipping and limiting. There is a chemistry of distortion happening that is not represented when you are in solo, so for most of the time I work with everything in.”

“I will generally listen to the record twice, to get an idea of what is going on, and I’ll run around the session, also observing gain staging and the way things are behaving. When I get stems I might start with clip gaining every single track down in the session, but that was not the case with this session. In my head I make a priority list of what I think prevents the song from really working, and what needs doing to improve it.”

“Once I finish this process, I will gain stage the mix and set up my mix bus based on what the kick is doing. Generally, the kick peaks will be digging most in the mix bus, and I need my mix to be as loud as the reference. So I will get the mix bus going early. You could call that a top-down approach, but what I do on the mix bus is pretty minimal. Once I have added the mix bus I will jump into the session, and get down to the nitty-gritty.”

RISING FROM A SOLID BASS

Pigliapoco was born in Los Angeles in 1990 from Argentinian parents, and grew up playing bass. When he was around 16, he recognised that the future was going to be digital, and he ended up interning at a label and recording studio not far from his school. It inspired him to attend The Los Angeles Recording School, and he graduated there with honours. During his time at the school he got a job engineering for rapper Juicy J, at Wyman studios, where the owner, Tip Wyman, became a mentor.

At 21, Pigliapoco signed a publishing deal with BMG as an engineer and producer. He worked with Cheryl Cole on her album ‘A Million Lights’ (2012), and with Fergie on her album ‘Double Dutchess’ (2017). He also worked with Josh Gudwin (engineer and mixer for Justin Bieber), and in 2015 Pigliapoco became the regular engineer for Chris Brown. He eventually graduated to also finding the beatmakers and producers for Brown’s albums, doing production, and mixing the final tracks.

Pigliapoco still works with Brown, but has over the last two years spread his wings and has mixed tracks for an impressive number of artists, among them The Kid Laroi, Pop Smoke, Gunna, DJ Khaled, Polo G, G-Eazy, H.E.R., Mooski, Chris Brown, and, of course Little Nas X, which gave him his first Billboard No.1, and two Grammy nominations. Pigliapoco clearly is breaking into the elite group of star mixers.

HYBRID STUDIO LOW DOWN

One result of Pigliapoco’s success is that he’s been able to buy a new house in Los Angeles, where he has installed a state-of-the-art hybrid studio. “My monitors are the PMC 6-2,” he explains. “I used to have the PMC 226 monitors, and the 6-2’s are essentially double. They have incredible low end. I think they go down to 10Hz or something like that, so I don’t need a sub. These things are insane! My room is 10x15ft, and I have the low end down by 7dB to make it work in the room. I use the Grace m905 monitor controller.

“I have a Mac with Pro Tools and my interface is the Lynx Aurora 24 I/O. This allows me to use channels 1 and 2 for my stereo output, 3 and 4 for the rough mix, 5 and 6 go to my D.W Fearn VT5 EQ, 7 and 8 go to my Undertone Audio Unfairchild 670M II, and 9 to 24 go to my Neve 5057 Orbit 16-channel summing mixer. I send eight stereo pairs to the Neve, which are the group tracks near the top of my Pro Tools sessions: drum bus, music bus, effect bus, and vocal buses.

“I have the outboard because of the sonics. It gives me a sound that I cannot get any other way. For example, the VT5 is on the insert of my master bus, and it takes out any abrasiveness in the top end. It’s incredible. Often when you are mixing, you are struggling to tame things that are too bright. Particularly when you are dealing with vocals today — people often boost the top end too much. Just running the signal through the VT5 flat corrects that. Rather than fighting with EQs and multiband compressors in the box, it’s a lot easier just to run your entire mix through the VT5 and a lot of that work is done for you.

“I use the Unfairchild on the vocals, as my first vocal compressor, and then I commit that. Songs tend to have verse, pre-hook and hook sections, and usually a lead vocal is on two tracks, because sometimes things will overlap. So I’ll work one vocal track of the verse on Channel 7 and the other vocal track on Channel 8, and then I’ll commit that, which frees up these two channels to work on the pre- or the hook lead vocal.”

BABY STEPS: MIX WALK THROUGH

Pigliapoco illustrates his process with his mix of ‘Industry Baby’. He recalls, “The production session was done in Logic, and I was sent audio files that were all printed. So there were no plugins. I asked the producers, Take A Daytrip, to send me the lead vocals with only Antares AutoTune applied, and the effects printed separately. When people send you tracks with effects like reverb, when you start compressing and EQ-ing them, the reverb changes. Having the effects separate gives me more control. In general I did use many of the delays and reverbs that they sent, because they wanted specific delays in specific places.

“I loaded all their audio files into Pro Tools, which made it easier, because actually, receiving a session this big as a Pro Tools session would have been really difficult. It would have been a lot of work to make that fit my workflow. There would have been plugins everywhere, and AutoTune on every track, and it would have become an enormous session. Instead I could import the audio in a fresh Pro Tools session, in which I could work more cleanly.

“They also sent me a rough, which sounded pretty good, as is the case when you’re dealing with high calibre artists and producers. I normally follow the rough very closely. In fact, I reference the rough all the time. I will listen to the rough for 20 seconds, just to get an idea of how much low end there is, how much compression is happening overall, how bright the vocals are, and how loud the mix is. If the mix is printed at -5 LUFS, I am going to have a really tough time getting my mix to sound really good and dynamic and as loud.

“Once I get the idea of the rough, I pull in the drums and I start referencing back and forth between the rough and my mix, constantly, to make sure I get a similar blend. Are the kick and the snare in the same place? Of course, that does not mean that if something sounds too loud for me, that I won’t turn it down. After the drums I pull in the bass, and listen again to the rough. Where is the bass? How loud is it? Is my bass louder? How loud is the music?

“My version is going to sound way better, it is going to hit harder, it is going to be more dynamic, but as a general rule, the blend needs to match the rough. If your 808 or bass is not hitting as hard, your mix won’t feel as big and dynamic. So referencing is the most important thing. I don’t want to go in the wrong direction.

“If the strings are the main part in the song, and I have them too low, the energy will go down. I also need to control the vocals. Usually they are too bright in the rough, so I need to find that middle place where they are bright enough, but not abrasive. In other words: balance what they have, and make it sound better.

“Sometimes people tell me: ‘don’t listen to the rough. The engineer did not get it right, do your thing.’ Of course, I’m happy to do that, but what they don’t know is that I will still reference the rough, just to get an idea of where things are. Think about it: maybe the A&R tells me not to listen to the rough, but an artist who does not have as much knowledge of mixing may like the rough. If I’m lucky, I get to speak with the artist as well, and they can tell me what they think of the rough. I have to have all these things in my head when I’m mixing.” 

OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE ORDER

Pigliapoco’s mix session of ‘Industry Baby’ is huge, about 200 tracks, and very well-organised. At the top are his master track, called Neve Return, Mix Buss, Mix prints, Rough Mix, the aforementioned eight groups that are sent to the Neve and his aux tracks. This entire section is part of his template. Below this are the audio tracks and some associated aux tracks: drums, bass, music, vocals, and a 90-track, four-bar horn outro in pink. 

“I am very OCD,” explains Pigliapoco. “Everything has to be very well organised. The master fader is at the top, because it is the master! Everything at the bottom feeds the tracks at the top. I don’t like having things like aux effects tracks at the bottom, as many people have. So the audio tracks feed the yellow bus tracks, which go to my Neve 5057, and then come back on my Neve Return, which is sent to my mix bus track.”

Before elaborating further on the top of his mix session, Pigliapoco follows the signal flow of his session, and his mix process, by first discussing his treatments on the audio tracks. “I put the tracks in the order in which I mix them, so I’m literally working my way down as I am mixing. So first there are my drums, in blue, because I start with them. They are the most important part of the session. And at the top of the drums is the kick.

“A lot of my work on the drums and other audio tracks is done with the Fabfilter Pro-Q3, which is my starting point for EQ, and I tend to notch out frequencies I don’t want. I always start with that, before I start boosting frequencies. First take out the bad stuff! I also use the iZotope Neutron 3 for this, which I adore. It is really easy to use,  and allows you to split the compression into bands. So if the transient part of the kick is too bright, I can split the compressor into two frequencies and affect the low end and the high end differently. 

“Those are my main two plugins on many audio tracks. There’s also a Waves Doubler on a reversed cymbal, because I wanted it wider. The Audio tracks usually feed the aux group tracks below them, and all drums go to the Drums bus track, on which I have the Acustica Audio Mike Dean Gainstation, doing 0.1 on the Clipper, which seems very minimal, but it makes a big difference, and adds drive. After that I have the Softube Weiss limiter, which I use to push the volume on the drums. I also have the iZotope Ozone, but I did not use it in this case. I love the iZotope stuff, because it’s really clean and transparent. I use many plugins, and don’t want too many that add colour, otherwise you end up with a mess.” 

BASS TRACK HACKS

Pigliapoco continues his exposé by tackling the six bass tracks, which are coloured brown. Three of which have 808s. “Usually there are only two bass tracks, but there are quite a few here! Most of these low-end tracks again have the Pro-Q3, and with the 808s I’m often notching around 200Hz and 400Hz, where they can sound boxy. In this case there’s a 1dB notch at 59Hz and at 104Hz. After that I’m using the Avid lo-fi plugin for some distortion and then I throw on the Waves MV2 Limiter, boosting both high level and low level. After that there’s a Neutron 3.”

The green music tracks consist of horns, which are in part played, despite many suspecting a looped sample. “Yeah, it’s a very extensive arrangement, with trombones, tubas, trumpets, saxophones and so on. I again use the Pro-Q3 extensively, with tons of notches to take away some abrasive frequencies. You can see this in the image of the Pro-Q3 on the main horn loop, which is the first green track below the bass tracks. That horn loop also has the Celestian Psychoacoustic Bus Processor, which is adding harmonics with the Teal Staging Harmonics knob, and widens the signal with the Yellow Stereo Elliptic knob. After that there’s some compression from the Waves CLA-3A.

“All horns go to a Horns Group aux, and then to the Music bus at the top. I don’t normally have plugins on the Music bus because there tend to be so many different elements in the music, and I prefer to treat each separately. Underneath the Horns Group aux is a track called Outro, in blue, which is the submix of the 60-track entire horn section at the bottom of the session in pink. I had to commit that down and then deactivate the original tracks, because the session would otherwise have been too big. Also, the blend was already there, so I did not want to disturb that.

“Below the Outro track are some tracks in brown, which are vocal effects, like ad libs, and they were more part of the music, which is why I placed them there. They go to the BGV group bus at the top. Below this are Nil Nas X’s main sung vocals in light blue, one hook track and three verse tracks, and two tracks down, in dark blue, his rap (verse2). They all they have largely the same signal chain, but settings change between the verse and the hook.”

“In the prehook (vpreld) I was cutting less low end. Because there are no drums at that point, I left more body in the vocals. Whenever an element drops out of the mix, other elements become heightened. So if the kick drops out, all of a sudden you are going to be more focused on the more high-end elements and there’s space for low end. You have to balance things, and to do this I used an extra plugin here, the FabFilter Pro-MB multiband compressor.

“For the rest, the UAD Pultec EQP -1A does a 10-12kHz boost, and I have the Waves CLA76, because I wanted a compressor that was really aggressive and dirty, and pumped. I don’t usually use the CLA76, but this song needed a compressor that was really aggressive and dirty. They wanted the vocal to sound like that. Today, I use the Unfairchild at the point where the CLA76 is in this session, but I did not have that unit at the time I mixed this.

“Another important plugin I used on the vocals was Overloud’s Gem Dopamine Audio Enhancer. It heightens and boosts the top end in a nice way. After that I put on the Oeksound Soothe 2, to tame all the top end I just boosted. There’s also a de-esser and the Neutron, which is out taking some bottom end.

“And finally there’s the Pro-C2 compressor, which is usually the last compressor I have in the chain. It’s another plugin that is intuitive and easy-to-use, which is very important to me. If it is a complicated plug-in I don’t really want to deal with it. There is a lot of stuff going on already as it is, and to have to learn something that is overly complicated is not worth the time.

“There are three sends on these lead vocals, one to my Seventh Heaven aux effects track, which has the LiquidSonics Seventh Heaven Convolution Reverb. It mimics the Bricasti. There’s also a send to my effects aux track with the Valhalla Vintage Verb, and another to an aux with the SoundToys Microshift. I blend my reverbs, instead of relying on one reverb to give me specific sound. I will often also EQ the reverb afterwards. On the Seventh Heaven I cut all the low end information, because it was clouding up the mix a little bit.”

VOCALS: STACKS ON

Below Lil Nas X’s lead vocals are stacks and stacks of background vocals, and below them, at the bottom of the session and just above the deactivated tracks, is Jack Harlow’s rap. “As I mentioned earlier, the audio tracks are sent to the aux track below them. There are tons and tons of vocal layers. The hook alone is reinforced with eight vocals. In this session, rather than work on individual tracks, I processed the aux group tracks, and tried to preserve the blends and vibe that was there. I am boosting less at 10kHz on the stacks, because I want the lead vocals to be prominent, and for the backgrounds to have a warmer sound. There’s also a Neutron 3 cutting around 2.5kHz, again to soften the stacks.”

Returning to the top of the session, Pigliapoco elaborates on the rough mix and mix bus tracks. “The red track with the pink clip called ‘Industry12324808’ is the rough mix, which came in at -9.6 LUFS, which is what I want. I always want my mix to be louder than the rough, and if the rough is extremely loud it leaves me no space to work with. When I put the vocals in, I’m already at -9 LUFS, and from there I only need another -2 dB. I can actually come in at -.5.5 LUFS before distortion, boosting everything little by little.

“On the mix bus I have the Acustica Audio Ruby, which is the  plugin version of my VT5. I loved the Ruby so much that I got the real deal after I mixed this song! After that I have a Pro-Q3, and then the Brainworx bx_digital V3 EQ, to notch out some weird frequencies. It is a great piece of gear. Finally there’s the Shadow Hills Mastering Compressor, and then the UAD Sonnox Oxford Limiter, for volume. I take that off when I send the mix for mastering.

“‘Industry Baby’ was mastered by Eric Lagg. When Pigliapoco sent it off, did he think the song would blow up like it did? “No. I know of course that every song Lil Nas releases does well, so I anticipated it being a hit, but not that it’d go to No.1 in the US. It’s been incredible, and I am blessed!” 

“I came up at Sony Music Studios in New York where I was working on SSL and Neve desks, which are great. But the workflow today is “pull this up, pull that up!” and you’d be going crazy on a console. Even in big studios the big consoles have, for the most part, become giant arm rests. In 2011 I mixed Common’s album The Dreamer/The Believer, and in 2012 Nas’ Life Is Good, both on an SSL. But then it got to the point that clients were asking for precise and minute revisions, like ‘can you turn the vocal up a quarter of a dB?’, that were impossible to do on a console.”

While Kinelski has joined the vast majority of his mix colleagues by going in-the-box and working from his own place, one old habit in particular is still very important to him. “I do a lot of listening. It is really easy in this time and age to overdo surgery, because you are mixing visually and you are adjusting things by a tenth of a dB, and you swear you can tell the difference. It is so easy to fall down that rabbit hole, overdoing everything. The way I work is to listen, primarily. I do everything that’s necessary – levels, vibe, treatments – and then I do the surgery and clean-ups last. I only deal with stuff that jumps out and bugs me. Everything else I leave because I like to keep things organic.”

COME OUT AND WORK

Specific to working with Eilish and O’Connell, Kinelski shares, “Our way of working is always the same: they have a new song, and they send it over. Finn sends me awesome stems. With some people you go, ‘oh, this is going to be tough’, but he does a really good job. I don’t normally know what treatments he has on things; if there are any reverbs at all they’ll be on a separate track, but normally things are super dry. Many of the vocals have no reverb, and all I do is add a little bit of the SoundToys MicroShift for more width.”

“The vocal production is already dialed in when I receive the sessions. I do a lot of really subtle editing on the vocals, because she sings so quietly and that means there’s a lot of mouth noise: breaths, lip sounds, and so on. I do this by clip gaining or using the pencil tool. I don’t pitch or tune anything. I don’t know whether they tune things, but Billie’s control is amazing so they might all be real takes. The vocals usually come with the distortion effects, and occasionally I’ll add a bit to that.”

“I take a day for my first mix pass, and then I’ll send it to them for feedback. They’ll come back to me with comments, usually really quickly. Sometimes they send me a new stem to swap for an old one. During the first part of the making of the album I added a small ambient reverb, barely audible, and the only comment that came back to me was: ‘take off the reverb.’  Billy is heavily involved, but I usually get feedback from Finn. With the album they sent me voice notes for revisions – they’d been talking into their phones, and they sent me the messages they had recorded! I’ve never had that happen before, but it was very cool. Billie would sing me the vocal parts she was referring to.”

BURYING A FRIEND

Kinelski gave extensive details of his mix of Eilish’s breakthrough single ‘Bury A Friend,’ to illustrate his approach. It all starts with his Pro Tools mix template. “I have many effects in my template, ready to go, but after I finish a mix I get rid of anything I did not use. I load all of Finn’s stems into the template session and, when I set all stems at unity, it will be virtually identical to his reference mix. Then I filter it into my template, routing and grouping things as I like them, and tweaking my master fader.”

“My mix process is pretty old school in that I start with kick, snare and hats, and get those feeling great. Then I bring in the vocals and make sure they sit well with the drums. Working on the drums and vocals this way is a hip-hop approach, I guess. Then I mute the vocals and bring in the bass, and work on bass and drums together. After that I’ll work on just keys and drums. I tend to work in groups, and build the entire track together like that.”

“My method on all songs for the album was similar. After I had dialed in Billie’s vocal for the first song that I mixed, I imported that vocal chain into every mix and tweaked it as necessary. They used the same vocal chain to record all her vocals, which meant that everything that came to me was super consistent. It’s one of the reasons why the album as a whole is consistent – Billie’s vocals are always captured with the same mic through the same preamp, and I used the same vocal mix chain for almost the entire album; although I might have changed it a little bit for one or two songs.”

Kinelski’s Pro Tools mix session of ‘Bury A Friend’ is, by contemporary standards, relatively modest at 69 tracks. The mix session consists of 18 drum tracks, four bass tracks, one piano track, four keys tracks, seven sound-effect tracks, six lead vocals, nine lead vocal harmonies, and seven backing vocals. Each set of vocals has an aux group track above it. Below all the audio tracks is one aux effects track (with the MicroShift), seven stereo tracks of outputs to the Dangerous Music 2-Bus, and VCA that controls these outputs, two master tracks and two final mix print tracks. The structure and tracks names also give some insight in O’Connell’s production approach, with drum tracks having names like ‘dial tone,’ and ‘tension,’ sound-effect tracks called ‘nightmare,’ ‘screech,’ ‘scary shit’ and ‘voldemort,’ and an impressive 22-track vocal arrangement with lead vocals spread over six tracks.

DIGGING DEEPER

Kinelski described his mix session from the top, starting by addressing the most striking aspect of the session: the fact that there are so few plugins. This obviously reflects the quality of O’Connell’s stems, but also, as Kinelski explains, “I like to keep it simple and use minimal plugins, most of the time. When I get new plugins it’s usually because they are in sessions sent to me by clients, and I want to see what they do. Other than that I have a really simple approach, especially with Billie’s stuff. I’ll be doing some volume riding, but the beauty of Finn’s stuff is that many of his transitions are built in to the session. The sound-effects create many of the dynamics, while the rest is mostly loop-driven.”

“The only plugins on the drums are the Waves SSL Channel Strip doing EQ, compression and gating. It’s my ‘go-to’ channel strip; I like to pretend I’m still on a console! I have it on two kick tracks, two snare tracks, and the hats. One of the kick tracks, the ‘PitchKick’, is a massive 808 and has the FabFilter Pro-Q2 pulling the sub frequencies down. The only other plugins on the instruments are the SSL Channel Strip on the piano track, and the SSL Channel Strip and FabFilter Pro-Q2 on the organ track.”

“I’ve divided the vocals into three groups, but that’s just my interpretation. Some of the harmonies could be backing vocals, or vice versa. The chain is the same on the lead vocals and lead vocal harmony groups, but I varied the settings. The insert chain starts with the FabFilter Pro-Q2 doing a low cut. Then there’s the Waves PuigChild 670 compressor on one of its default settings, a Waves De-esser, another Pro-Q2 scooping the mid-range, the UAD 1073, and the Waves Vocal Rider.”

“I love the Pro-Q2, because it allows you to audition the specific frequency you’re working on. You press a button, sweep through to find what you don’t want, then pull it down. I kept doing that, combing over the vocal, and it ended up with this mid-range scoop. All EQ was subtractive, because I loved the tone of the vocal as it was and felt that all the frequencies I needed were already there. I added a hair of top end with the Neve, but that’s it. The Vocal Rider is the final insert, and it’s smoothing out any dips and peaks, maybe by 2dB. It’s a corrective thing, and I prefer using that to a compressor. I do my vocal rides, i.e. my performance automation, after I set the Vocal Rider.”

“The two lead vocal aux tracks also have a send to the MicroShift, which is the only one of my template’s aux effect tracks that I ended up using for this mix and therefore left in the session. The thing that’s interesting is that I automated the Mute on the MicroShift aux because it was giving off the slightest bit of hiss. I don’t automate the Bypass, because I found out that it sometimes clicks when it goes in and out. The Mute does not do that.”

“Below the MicroShift aux are the send tracks to the Dangerous Music 2-Bus summing mixer. DBus 1-2 is for drums, 3-4 is for bass, 5-6 is for keys, 7-8 is for sound-effects, 9-10 is for lead vocals, 11-12 is for backing vocals, and 15-16 is my effect returns – in this case only the MicroShift. I have the Steven Slate Virtual Mix Rack on all DBus tracks, using various different modules. The sound effect DBus has the Pro-Q2, and the backing vocals have the Sonnox Oxford Inflator. The signal comes back summed to stereo on the two Print master tracks. They have identical plugins, with the only difference being a lower setting on one of the limiters to give John Greenham, the mastering engineer, more to play with. The chain is the UAD Ampex ATR102 set to 30ips and half inch, UAD Thermionic Culture Vulture with just a hair of drive, the FabFilter Pro-L2 limiter, and the TC Electronics Clarity M meter.”

LISTEN BEFORE YOU GO

With Billie Eilish’s album still riding high in the charts everywhere, Kinelski feels on top of the world and his phone is ringing non-stop. “It’s been crazy,” he says. “But it’s cool, and I’m grateful. I knew this was going to be big, but I had no idea it was going to be this big. I had an inkling when I saw an industry showcase they did before the EP came out – normally the industry A&R people in LA are a tough crowd, always checking their phones to see where they’re going next, but from the first chord Finneas played and the first note Billie sang, you could hear a pin drop. They captivated everyone. After I finished mixing the album, I listened to it analytically as a whole for the first time, and thought, ‘Wow, this is a dark album.’ There really is hardly any high end in there, and no reverb. I wondered how it would translate to the world, but it’s been nothing but positive!”

The sound that Eilish and O’Connell have created together, aided by Kinelski and Greenham, is unlike anything else in the charts. The next decade will show whether their sound will remain unique to them, or turn out to be a harbinger of a new direction in music and production.