Studio Feed: Starting from Scratch #1 Pt. 5

Hey Everyone,

I revisited Track #1 (the breakbeat one) because after getting some feedback from friends, the clear consensus was that the track has everything it needs, and it's dope and I should finish it off, mix it down and send it off.  Sometimes you need other people to tell you these kinda things 😆

So to polish this one off, I first mess around with the kick and breaks pattern to get something a little bit more interesting and live-sounding. I also worked on the snares so that they had some low end beef as well, because they're almost always hitting when there is no kick so they can have way more punch down there than with a 4x4 beat. That's more or less the first 30 minutes--some of this was included in the recent breakbeat tips video.

I spent a bit of time double checking the phase relationships on stuff, mostly the kick/breaks loop/clap. I thought that it actually sounded better with the breaks loop phase reversed (those L and R buttons on a Utility) as it layered over the kick. I think in the end I switched it back....I may need to check on some headphones to be sure though. Similarly I made sure all of my parallel processing wasn't causing phase issues. I usually only run into a scenario where this kind of attention is needed when I'm combining loops/samples and there's a lot of frequency overlap (like the breaks loop) or using a lot of parallel processing. Phase cancellation is often this strange "why doesnt it sound right" issue that you can't quite put your finger on until you are able to A/B. The whole topic is quite the rabbit hole and gets into real audio science but the easiest way to check for yourself is to just A/B with a utility that has both L and R enabled.

I also worked a lot on the drums mix, using heavy parallel compression and distortion to get them sounding really big and punchy. Might've overdone it a bit honestly, but I'll continue to refine after checking on headphones and other systems. I did a little bit of mixing on everything else too, managing transients with compressors as well as manual audio fades.

Two other quick techniques I used in this one:

-When trying to line up the breaks loop and my kick, having the transients line up was really important, so I extracted the groove from the breaks loop and applied it to the kick. The "extract groove" feature is not just for stealing swing, but also can be useful for little ms adjustments like this. It can make sure any off-grid nuances are consistent among multiple channels (midi or audio). Doing this keeps the groove and natural sound of the breaks loop, rather than if I was to quantize that so it matches the rigid kick and lose all the vibe.

- At 39:45, I send one of my aux channels (parallel distortion) to another one (reverb). You have to right click the aux you want to send to within the channel you want to send, and select "Enable Send". I think they're disabled by default to avoid any accidental feedback loops. It can be fun to mess around with this and chain a bunch of delays and verbs together for example.