Studio Pass: Kurt Ballou - Free 2-day course [Live Streaming Now!]

Seen both of them ( eyal levi and ballou) and well, different approaches. While Levi's one felt really rushed, this one lacked some beef to it, although I loved the overhead mic technique shootout.
Hope it gets better tomorrow though. I have the feeling that the two trailers they put out are most of the action we'll see but I hope to be wrong.

Hmm. Well that has me worried. I really liked Eyal's classes but they seemed way too slow to me so if this is slower than that...
 
Enjoying it a lot today, however, if those are raw mixes I'd better dedicate my time on any other thing :p

he seems to typically track with outboard gear and dial in the sounds he wants before hitting tape/daw. there is no sample replacement or reamping etc going on here either, so there's no endless tweaking the sounds. all of this means that you have good tracks from the start and you are not endlessly tweaking the base sounds but just refining what you have.
 
The HM2 type pedal used to be called the LHP by Enormous Door Effects, but the designer Joe (super nice guy!) left and started his own company called Lone Wolf FX. The pedal is now called the Left Hand Wrath and I'm pretty sure all the pre-release models are sold out (I bought one, as did Victor from Entombed!)

His facebook page is: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Lone-Wolf-FX/248549871878230?fref=ts

And yes, for anyone curious, I was the one who asked about the HM2 haha
 
As to the pointers I picked up:

- It's not just compression that can work better staged. Try it on EQ too.

- Gating the room mic with the shells as the trigger can clean up the sound massively. I'll have to experiment with that.

- Manually strip silencing the tom hits, then duplicating them, HP one and LP the other. Extend the HP'ed one to give a longer more natural decay to the hit without annoying cymbal bleed.

- He seems to prefer splitting/micing instruments in order to process the high and low ends separately.

Any that you guys particularly liked?
 
Overall it was an awesome seminar. The big epiphany I had I guess was realizing how much pros parallel process everything in the mix. Instead of making a eq/compression changes to one track he was often duplicating the track, processing one, and blending it with the original track. He pretty much did that for everything including guitar, bass, and every peice of the drum kit. I knew parallel processing was popular but not to that extent.
 
Diffusing the room mics is something I need to try.
I already knew most of his tricks but it was great overall.
 
He mentioned "auto-mix" compression on his guitar bus for all guitars to be sent to. I wish he would have went a little deeper with this. Distorted Guitar compression is still a bit of a grey area for me. It never usually sounds better. I need to experiment.
 
He mentioned "auto-mix" compression on his guitar bus for all guitars to be sent to. I wish he would have went a little deeper with this. Distorted Guitar compression is still a bit of a grey area for me. It never usually sounds better. I need to experiment.

I think he kept a lot of his real mixing tricks close to his chest. If you noticed his audio examples jumped pretty quickly from pre-mix to final mix.
 
No magic involved, he's just good at what he does.

I agree, my point is that during the seminar he went from the pre-mixing stage to the bus processing stage without going into real depth about the processing he did for the guitars, bass and drums for that track.
 
Overall it was an awesome seminar. The big epiphany I had I guess was realizing how much pros parallel process everything in the mix. Instead of making a eq/compression changes to one track he was often duplicating the track, processing one, and blending it with the original track. He pretty much did that for everything including guitar, bass, and every peice of the drum kit. I knew parallel processing was popular but not to that extent.

Im at jacob Hansens place right now and he does it a ton too.
 
Distorted Guitar compression is still a bit of a grey area for me. It never usually sounds better. I need to experiment.

I agree, I generally don't compress distorted guitars at all when I mix. I find that they're already fairly compressed just due to the nature of them. If anything I'll do some multiband compression to tame certain frequencies.

No magic involved, he's just good at what he does.

Nah, I'm calling magic.
 
That is also what I took from it. I think I struggle with attack and release settings on distorted guitar. On drums,vocals, bass etc. I have no issues but, on distorted guitar I always seem lose something when I compress. I will have to keep playing around with guitar bus compression.
 
I watched a couple hours of part two and quite enjoyed it. It would be awesome if they got Andy or Colin to do one. Kurts mixes are crazy, always have been. Im probably gonna buy the downloads when I have some spare funds. Does anyone know its 100 for both days/classes or per day??