This album is one of my favorites from them. I'd never payed much attention to the liner notes and realized YOU had mixed it. No wonder I loved the sonic quality of it so much. Thanks for putting out these in depth vid's breaking each part down. It's been truly inspirational in my mixing process. I hope you are able to do more of these. Killer work Ken!
Hi Ken!! A big fan of yours from Italy (Failure, Replicants, Lusk!!, Year Of The Rabbit, Ken Andrews & Digital Noise Academy) : ) THANK YOU for letting me know about such a MASTERPIECE like Underoath - Erase Me with wich I'm now TOTALLY IN LOVE !!!! Keep up the great things you do and congrats again for one of the greatest comeback in music history like you (and Greg & Kelly) did with FAILURE - THE HEART IS A MONSTER which is absolutely KILLER !!
This is great Ken!! If possible, I'd love to see a video focused on the song "Hunted" off Year of the Rabbit, especially the lyrics and the haunting worldbuilding you do there.. one of my favorite tracks ever!! Would be great to see how you approach a track's lyrics like that from scratch
Cool video - would also love to see you break down some Year of the Rabbit tracks... The guitars and electric bass on that record just rock - in fact everything on it rocks!
Guys notice how when Ken engages the ssl bus comp the mix sounds louder and gets a bit of a arse lift while there’s no additional makeup gain applied? That’s a perfect implementation of mix compression 🤘
I hope you keep making content. Seeing what you do and your thought process behind it is so helpful, I'm learning a lot from your videos! I checked out your website... do you offer mixing services to the general public or do you just work with labels?
With the long chains of bus processing it’d be cool to hear them not only bypassed but sort of bypassed in order… ie when you toggled the ssl style comp we still were hearing all the other bus processing too but would be cool to hear it being added in order like all bus plugins at that moment by passed then start adding them in one by one type deal? Not complaining just a thought, maybe others disagree with me. Sall good.
@@KenAndrewsMusic not sure if you captured audio separate from screen grab but I could definitely see plugins later in the chain active while you were toggling previous ones. Again…. Not complaining 😄
another great video ken! How do you like the Slate mix buss compressors? I've just swapped out the waves ssl G compressor against (currently) the Red, and I think it sounds great. Nice to have the side chain highpass possibilities too.
hi ken i was wondering if you could talk about what it was like writing and recording your first album comfort, i really love the sound of that album and i'm interested about your writing process as well as what it was like working with albini
Hi Ken I've been a fan of not only Failure but your solo releases are amazing . In the Audiophile world on RU-vid any sound demo that requires music is nearly always taken down with a copyright complaint from the Artist or Record company . Have you ever considered making a few tracks available that would be free for us to use ?. It would be a chance for others to hear just how incredible an artist you are and we would not be forced to play offensive generic crap lol
Hi Ken, nice videos... Would you make a video showing your mixing setup for us audio geeks? I wonder which monitors you're using and what your acoustics is like in your room, Kind regards.
Ken this has been a fantastic video series - thank you for the insight. I have a quick question regarding FG-X - are you exporting the final tracks with this engaged? I’m assuming you’re just using this to gain some extra volume and a bit of transient designing when the additional controls? What kind of levels are you hitting for export (fader, rms, lufs… etc?) or does that not really matter? Thanks again!
Yes, I usually leave the fgx on because it alters the sound enough to warrant that. I usually set the output ceiling at minus 1 db and overall I try to keep what I send to mastering under -10LUFS.
In the intro clip for your channel, the clip you use from "Distorted Fields" has the high pitched, feedbacky-yet-percusive sound (a similar sound is used in Oasis' "F***ing in the Bushes". What is that??? Is that just feedback? Is it a highly processed piano? It's super cool but I can't figure out how to emulate it.
Hi Ken. So, there's a RU-vid channel called Game Grumps with Arin Hanson and Daniel Avidan. They have 5.3 million subscribers and do this show they call Guest Grumps. They've had Weird Al, Finn Wolfhard, Jacob Anderson, Dan Harmon, Ben Swartz, Jamie Lee Curtis...basically, they're legit. And they're HUGE Failure fans. They've talked about Failure a few times and how you're one of their favorite bands ever. Also, they're based in LA. And you don't even have to know how to play videogames, Al sure didn't know how to. You don't even have to be funny. I mean they had on Rob Schneider...I kid, I kid. So, I just think it would be awesome for the Grumps, awesome for your band, and awesome for me to watch if you would consider being on their show.
Hey Ken. As an aspiring mixer, I really dig your mixing/production videos a whole bunch, & I've thoroughly enjoyed this whole hardcore rock walkthrough. However, I am a little perplexed by what you're doing with the vocal chain. On one side, I understand the idea in theory: splitting the vocal tracks up so you can focus on each section, & surgically fine-tune the tracks to get them sounding good & proper. But on the other side, wouldn't that eat up so much CPU in Pro Tools? I don't know how biased I am in asking that because I usually mix in Pro Tools on my Macbook Pro laptop, & if I use too many plugins, my computer is not happy with it sometimes, & occasionally I'll get the little blip saying I've run out of CPU power. :( Regardless, thanks for doing these videos, mate. Super well done
Thanks, Ken! I did not like what the Slate Tape was doing until you mentioned the bass bloom. I was mostly hearing it add mud and remove clarity/detail before you pointed out what it was doing to the bass overall. It definitely "de-digital-izes" the mix a bit, but I probably would have aborted the mission and tried another piece/plug-in there based on what I heard it doing to the mids. Really nice mix in the end. Thanks for sharing with us, man!
At that point in the process I was looking for something to slightly roll off high end. You have to be careful with mix buss processing and not be swayed to always pick the brighter choice which is the general inclination.
Hey, Ken! Thanks for the awesome video! I always enjoy watching you work and learning how you get to the end goal. Quick questions for you. I own some of the iZotope stuff (Ozone 9). What are your thoughts on it? Have you ever used it? How does it compare to the combo of plug-ins that you are using on the stereo buss? I am not talking about the “mastering assistant,” but about the quality of the individual modules in Ozone vs the individual plug-ins from other manufacturers.
Hey, Ken. Great video as always. I have a question. I notice that most of the vocal doubles look *really* similar in wave form to the lead. I’m wondering if it’s something where the doubles vocal wasn’t necessarily a second take, but some sort of pitch shifting or “humanizing” a copy/pasted take of the original to just slightly vary the performance?
Ken, the slate digital plugins tape appear to be in M/S, based on the metering ballistics. Are you doing M/S by default on the mix bus processing, or is that the default for that plugin?
Loved your work on this album and always wanted to know how Spencer's screams were processed. This is amazing! Do you know what mics were used for the vocals and if they were printed with any compression/EQ, or no?
I was the engineer on Erase Me and can answer! Vocal chain was a Manley Reference Cardioid through a Neve 511 preamp, with silk deactivated and a little hi pass filtering, into a distressor. So printed with compression, no EQ aside from the HPF
@@erictaft6403 Thank you so much for the response! Awesome work on the album. That is a Mic I haven't heard much about, that's pretty cool! As for the distressor, how much GR do you like to do going in?
@@chrismorrison5497 thanks so much bud! I don’t remember for certain, I definitely don’t have a hard and fast rule for how much GR I’m looking for each time. Probably a lot? 16-20db or so. With the aggressive Vox, I feel like hitting it hard out of the gate like that really helps not only with the aggression, but helps the artists performance when every nuance of a scream or aggro vocal can come through in their headphones as well
It's the first digital reverb that was created to emulate a plate with a much reduced form factor. It is as much of a plate as any digital plate program.
@@JoeyFTL That's just not true. I've been using 250s since they first came out. They have a unique and fantastic sound, but they're NOT a plate reverb.
I’ve used a real one a few times. I don’t know the history of it but I do know that I usually use it when I want a longer reverb similar to a nice plate, but maybe a bit more ghostly and less obvious. Love.
