Kia Bowsh Mixing Session 3

Today I ended up arriving at teh W.A.T.T. STUDIOS at 10am this morning and left tonight at midight. that 's right 14hrs straight of mixing 3 smoke breaks.

Anyways I find that to be pretty insane anywyas. Here is the scoop on what happened today in the Kia Bowsh mixing session.

I actually finished the first mix of "Prajna' by Kia Bowsh last week. This week I sat down and studied my ass off on everything I could learn about nuendo. So I decided today I would start the mix again from scratch and apply some new techniques I was shown.

Compresion & Dynamics:

Link To YouTube Tutorial

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So the fist thing I did today was re-import all of the tracks back into nuendo. The fist stage is to clean up all the audio trakcs which took about 14 hours today just to clean up. So what you want to do is go upto your audio file drop downa t the top of nuendo go to Advanced and click on delete silence. The Delete silnce window will now pop up and you can edit your open and close threshold to tell the program where exactly you want to assign there zones aroudn the audio you want to keep. After you ahve all your audio selected you hit process and it will automatically delete all the unwanted audio aprts from your track.

You don't just stop here though just because th edelte silence function deleted all your unwanted data you will stil ahve to zoom in and edit each sample by hand which meens some of the startand end points may have got chopped off and you will have to add either crossfade or a fade out tail on teh end of your samples to make it sound more smoothe.

The next step after you have gone through all your tracks and cleaned all the nosie out of the audio tracks you want to look at your audio peaks. You will see that theya re all over the place some are just ready to sclip wihich means distort and some are way to low. So now that we ahve all our silence deleted now we wil have to go back into our samples and cut each note from the samples which is just like cutting film in half we will sue our scissor tool to separate all our notes into regions.

Okay now all our notes are cut on every track, that took a while didn't it? haha now we look at the waveform the top of the waveform are called peaks it's the peak of the audio. What we want to do now is lower these peaks down to amtch the rest of the peaks. Why do we do this? To create consistency and also to save us alot of hard ache in reproduction. sometimes if peaks are to harsh and all over the place it's hard for your home stereo or even car stereo to handle these peaks and may even decide to distort thsoe waveforms. So lets go to our timeline in nuendo and if you click on a region or sample you will notice a line across your sample in blue with 2 arrow and a dot in the middle. take your selection tool teh pointer and move down the dot in the middle til you see the highest peak line up with the audio peak next to it from the other region. We also want to do this for all the track aswell. This is also a great way of doing a sort of natural compression I find that if you can hand edit as much effects or processing as possible you will get the best results.

Okay so now we have all our audio cut and the peaks of the entire songs dynamics have been cleaned up. Lets take a minute to go upto our first track solo this track and just listen to it. Is teh bass to high? Maybe it;s to low? is the treble to high or low? does teh track stil ahve noise coming into it from under the audio? try and pcik out what you can make better about the indivudal tracks and this is where you start your signal processing compression, eq, delay, noise gates, limiters, ect.

I will stop here for now for I just wanted to sahre a small portion of what I was doing today. I will talk more about signal processing on a later date.

So this is the exact process that I went through today. I will let you in on one more cool feature that nuendo and cubase has to offer. If you are in stacked recording mode and you set your region marker to lets say 2 bars. we record enable our audio track to record some audio. If we go into our transport window and put our track to paly on loop and hit record as we are recording our audio each full cycle that it loops through teh zone will create a separate lane(Audio Track) for our recording.

Why would we need this?

Say that your recording alone and you don't have another person to keep hitting record for you, you can literally push record and play your part as many times as you like when you hit stop the audio will be automatically separated for you into lanes this way you can cut up the audio that you liek and dislike, choose the audio you like and mute the parts you dislike then you can merge all your selcted bits onto one track the the bad audio parts will be erased. if you want to recall up one fo the parts that got erased you can still go into your pool (where the program saves all the audio in a session) and bring that audio track back in by draging it to your timeline.

So I hope that helps a bit and hopefully you guys can try this for yourselves this wil save you hours of editing time and is a very professional way to get your audio to sound really nice.

Ryan 'Tweak' Clark

W.A.T.T. STUDIOS

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