Periphery Creativelive

[Trevoire520]

Just been watching this, it's wrapped up for the day but will be getting rebroadcast until day 2 tomorrow. Some really good advice on drum tuning, well worth checking out:

https://www.creativelive.com/live2

 

[He's Dead, Jim]

I paid for the on-demand version and I'm really hoping it was worth the money hahah. What I saw seemed very useful.

 

[frazzlepuff]

Aye, mixing session tomorrow should be good. Creative Live courses, I've noticed, tend to get a lot more interesting on the second day.
Seems to make sense they're focussing on drums so much, it's the first thing I noticed about Periphery that their drum sound is awesome. Apparently not even sample replaced, which is pretty astounding.

 

[Studdy]

Really interested in the Gating the High End between drum hits part. It sounds like a great trick. Can anyone here chime in a go into a little more detail what is going on and how it can be achieved without FabFilter plugs.

 

[Trevoire520]

Yeah I've used it on a couple of sessions recently and it's been great actually. Basically you're just using a very fast multi-band gate on the high end of the snare/kick/tom channel. I tried it with ML4000 and couldn't get it to work, but it's MUCH easier in the fabfilter plugin as you can have it triggered from a sidechain. Well worth in investment imo. You could probably do it yourself using normal plugins and filters, but would be a bit more of a hassle to set up.

That along with drumleveler has really been helping my natural drum sounds, you can get the consistency of samples but using your actual tracks (if the drummer is decent)

 

[anotherpaul]

I could listen to Nolly all day long, he's such a good speaker. I like his approach as well - he gets his shit right at the source, doesn't stick to conventional "rules" and gear.

Really interested in the Gating the High End between drum hits part. It sounds like a great trick. Can anyone here chime in a go into a little more detail what is going on and how it can be achieved without FabFilter plugs.

It's a multiband gate/expander thing, which is I believe quite common to use on toms.
Basically you duplicate the track, hipass one, lowpass another, and apply different gate settings so that the high track's sustain is short and low track's sustain is long.
The difference with Nolly is that he uses single plugin for this and leaves the low part as it is and only gates the high part.

I often do a quite similar trick of using parallel gate that I think was populalrized by Kurt Ballou. The gate is super fast and just lets through the clicks (like 1-2 ms) of kick and snare with no sustain at all. You can blend this in to add punch to the drums without compressing the main tracks or boosting highs on them.

 

[Nolly]

I'm so glad you guys enjoyed the session. I, of course, have learned a lot from this forum over the years so I'm happy to spread that knowledge if I can.

Cheers!

 

[4Eyes]

he gets his shit right at the source, doesn't stick to conventional "rules" and gear.

I believe this is a base for great results...many people, especially not so experienced artists, don't realize that and they think that there are some special, magic plugins used at mixing or later at mastering stage that will fix source issues...

 

[Studdy]

Thanks Nolly, my favorite Creative Live yet.

Couple quick questions if i may.

I notice that you use VCC console emulation sometimes on busses but not on the individual channels. Do you find that to work better than the suggested method of channel instance on track and bus instance on bus? I also didn't see any on the master/main bus.

Aside from using TrackSpacer plugin have you achieved the same/similar results splitting the lows and highs on different tracks or sidechain multiband compressor? Example duplicate bass low pass one hi pass the other and compress differently, sidechain the low only to the bass. Or is the trackspacer doing something more than can be achieved this way?

I notice that your snare and kick bus/aux are stereo. Is there a reason for this or they could have been mono and it not matter.

Cheers dude, thanks again

 

[Revson]

Great CreativeLive, Nolly. Yours was definitely one of the more engaging sessions I've watched. Any plans on doing another in the future?

 

[brianhood]

Damn! I had no idea this was happening.

I guess Creative Live gets another $100 from me haha

 

[Nolly]

Thanks Nolly, my favorite Creative Live yet.

Couple quick questions if i may.

I notice that you use VCC console emulation sometimes on busses but not on the individual channels. Do you find that to work better than the suggested method of channel instance on track and bus instance on bus? I also didn't see any on the master/main bus.

Aside from using TrackSpacer plugin have you achieved the same/similar results splitting the lows and highs on different tracks or sidechain multiband compressor? Example duplicate bass low pass one hi pass the other and compress differently, sidechain the low only to the bass. Or is the trackspacer doing something more than can be achieved this way?

I notice that your snare and kick bus/aux are stereo. Is there a reason for this or they could have been mono and it not matter.

Cheers dude, thanks again

Thanks!
1 - I tend to prefer VTM on individual tracks, it's just the mood I'm in currently! The mixbuss modules tend to be more coloured than the channel modules, so I find I get nice enhancement just using those on instrument busses; there is one on the mixbuss too, if you catch the very beginning of day 2 you'll see the part about top-down mixing where I run through the whole master chain.
2 - I'm sure that will achieve great results too. I like that Trackspacer only ducks the frequencies where they actually coincide the most, so to me it is the most transparent solution. That said, in context, we are talking extremely subtle differences here, and I am mainly using Trackspacer because it means I can use a more simple bass chain without splitting across several tracks.
3 - That's just because Logic creates stereo busses by default when you make summing folders. It doesn't bother me either way so I leave it as is.

Great CreativeLive, Nolly. Yours was definitely one of the more engaging sessions I've watched. Any plans on doing another in the future?

Cheers! I'm not sure, I definitely really enjoyed it but we would have to come up with a distinctly different class to make it worthwhile. Could certainly be fun though!

Damn! I had no idea this was happening.

I guess Creative Live gets another $100 from me haha

Awesome, thanks man, that's really cool that you'd check it out

 

[elmoe]

Cool stuff will definitely buy a studio pass. Certainly not cheap though for this sort of thing, hope i support the band a lot by buying one

 

[Nolly]

Cool stuff will definitely buy a studio pass. Certainly not cheap though for this sort of thing, hope i support the band a lot by buying one

Thanks for your support!
Only you can decide if it's worth it for you, but I will say having witnessed the operation from the inside, all of their on-location workshops are major endeavours for CreativeLive: expenses alone include flying Matt and I in (internationally in my case), renting all three rooms of a pro studio out for 4 days (they need dedicated video and broadcast rooms), all the crew involved and their gear (a lot!), and so many extra costs too. They also stream it for free out of good will.
I think that if I could have fast-tracked myself to knowing what I know now and went into detail about during in the class, from - say - even a year ago, it would definitely have been worth $100. A lot of heartache, frustration, time and money went into learning these skills and information!

 

[Ataraxia2320]

.

 

[He's Dead, Jim]

Certainly not cheap though for this sort of thing, hope i support the band a lot by buying one

Not trying to shill for CreativeLive, but if you look at comparable products- the Eyal Levi podcast subscription, The Pro Audio Files videos and lessons, and other courses like this I've seen- $100 is honestly a steal for the quality and amount of material, plus the goodies you get for buying the on-demand version. Ermz charges $20 for a PDF of the Systematic Mixing Guide; if this goes into 5x as much detail as that does- which I think it absolutely does, and more- the price to content ratio holds up very reasonably.

 

[smy1]

I'm not in the market for this product, but I really don't know why $100 for any educational product is considered expensive. I've paid over $2000 for a single seminar (not audio-related) and it was worth the money 7 times over (I made a little over 14k in a year after implementing strategies I learned there).

A 60 minute guitar lesson with a good teacher costs $70-100. So does an hour with a good personal trainer/physio or an adjustment at the chiropractor. Women pay $200 for their hair regularly.

I don't really know what quality anyone expects from a $9.99 product?

 

[Jaymz]

Purchased!

The videos are "coming soon" right now so I assume the course hasn't quite finished yet...

 

[Nolly]

Yeah they go through and trim out unnecessary gaps, as well as neatening any awkward audio transitions as best as possible (it's hard to remember to wait between finishing talking and hitting a drum, or not to talk over the playback etc - the lav mic sounds terrible for that stuff and a guy is riding faders in real time to switch between inputs). Last I heard it'll all be finalised and up tomorrow

 

[Jaymz]

Lovely stuff, cheers dude!