TheMakingOf Archives | Audiomovers

We visited number-one-selling songwriter and record producer Alina Smith (ITZY, Red Velvet, Fall Out Boy) in her home studio, to delve deeper into the process behind the production and mix of Bathing Suit, by her LYRE MUSIC GROUP counterpart, Elli Moore.

Taking us into the original Ableton session, Alina demonstrates the magnitude of creative possibilities that come from using your voice to create synth and pad sounds, unveiling the plugins she uses to bring these elements to life.

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TRANSCRIPT

Hi, I’m Alina Smith, a writer and producer in LYRE Music Group and today I’m going to be showing you the production on Bathing Suit by Elli Moore.

Okay, the first thing I want to point out here – this is a technique I use on every single song I produce. I have a pretty airy voice, and I use it as a pad quite a bit, so you can hear this here.

I really advocate for people using their voices and their natural qualities to enhance their productions and h ere I basically stack several parts, to add a little bit of ‘oomph’ to this post-chorus.

So I accomplish this very simply. Obviously starts with the voice. You have to sing, you know in a soft, airy way. I also use Valhalla Shimmer plugin by Valhalla DSP. It’s one of my favourites, it really does add a shimmer on top of the track. It’s very oddly named.

And I use Center by Waves, which is one of my favourite plugins for vocals. It helps me get background vocals out of the way of the leads by spreading them to the side. This is what it sounds like without processing. As you can tell, quite dull, and this is it with it on. Big difference.

Okay, another technique that I use, pretty much in every song, some people call this chants, I call this gangs. It can be like a ‘yeah’ ‘uh’ like a kind of a yell thing. Or it’s like chanty type of singing, like we have this hook here.

So obviously, we’re trying to emphasise that ‘la la la’ hook and this is a really good way to do it. So the way I’ve accomplished this is the two of us are basically singing these gangs together in the room.

There’s no auto-tune, the mic is pretty far away, like about this distance from us. And we’re just singing very kind of loosely, wildly, it doesn’t have to be too on pitch and too perfect because it’s tucked in under the lead vocal in the mix. This is what it sounds like without any processing.

One of the things though, that makes these gangs for me is the processing. So I have this chain here that I just called ‘Dirty Gang’.

It starts with Decapitator which is a saturation plugin, and then I will take away the lowest part of the frequency range and the highest part of the frequency range.

Then I use my favourite plugin ever, which is Valhalla vintage verb I am known as the ‘Valhalla back girl’. And here I’m just adding a bit of this reverb, you know, a pretty high decay three seconds is pretty significant.

And then we have Center which again spreads it a bit more to the sides . This is what it sounds like with all the processing on.

To create the sound of multiple singers when you’re alone, you have to change the way you sing. You basically need to sing a melody and try to pretend you’re different people you can sing it in like a hooty kind of voice, you can sing very nasally, you can sing it in your normal type of range, type of voice and combining all of these different techniques will make it sound like a group.

There is another technique I want to show you guys that also has to do with using your voice as an instrument. It’s basically singing and re-pitching to make almost like a synth part out of a voice. So I’ll play you guys this pre-chorus part of the song.

So if you listen close, there is a part underneath here that is sort of this very high pitched, floating kind of vocal. This could have been accomplished with the synth, but I chose to just sing this in and process it in a way that makes it sound like this weird like processed synthy high thing.

So I’ll play it solo’d. So obviously if you are an amazing singer and can sing this in whistle tone, you can do that. Most of us are not, so I sing this, I’m pretty sure an octave lower than this. And then what I did is just add reverb on top of it. So it’s very easy to do and quite fun the melodies you can get this way.

We have really great mix and mastering engineers we work with. A lot of the time, the engineers will do the bulk of the work on their own. But we will get together with them on Zoom using LISTENTO and we will give notes and they can just in real time, fix those final tweaks for us.
We’re teaming up with some of the most esteemed producers, engineers and mixers in the game who are lifting the hood behind their biggest hits.

In the latest episode of #TheMakingOf, Bainz sat down to chat with us about his creative process by breaking down the mix of T-Shyne – ‘Fighting Demons’ (feat. Young Thug). Bainz broke down some of the workflows and techniques he brings to most of his sessions, as well as what’s unique to this track and how he approaches maximizing what is already great about the track, and how he incorporates so much analog gear into his mixes.

Huge congratulations to Bainz who was nominated for two Grammy Awards at Sunday night’s 65th Annual Awards Show.

Bainz was in contention for ‘Best Rap Performance’ for Gunna & Future ft. Young Thug’s ‘Pushin P’ and ‘Best Rock Album’ for his work on Machine Gun Kelly’s ‘Mainstream Sellout’.

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TRANSCRIPT

My name is BAINZ, we’re at my studio in LA, this is my mix room and we’re going to actually jump into a song called ‘Fighting Demons’. This song has Thug and T-Shyne on it, it was actually on T-Shyne’s album.

I kind of wanted to show you guys the way I work and a couple of the workflow things that I tend to do in most of my sessions.

Alright, let’s dive in. So we’ve got the stems over here, the instrumental stems, and my vocals down here, I have my 808 over here as well, you can see the amount of like automation.

And what that is, is basically it’s to make room for the attack of the kick, the song is very 808 driven, but that kick punches through, I’m just gonna play the section so you can kind of see going into the hook a little bit. The 808 still feels really big. And I kind of tend to push those exciting things.

Let’s jump into the vocals. Because I’m using analogue gear, I have this hidden folder here called printed vocals. And it just shows you that the stuff that I ran, into is not really much it’s committing the autotune, these are multiband, clean-up things, that’s what the Dedger, is the spectral shaper does that, Soothe does that.

Let’s see what’s going on on the hook. This is a little bit of verb under there tucked in with the main vocals, I’m just gonna solo just that section.

In the mix, it doesn’t have to be too crazy, just those couple of things like I want a little more bounce over there. Because I use so much analogue gear on my mix bus and stuff like that I have the software called Session recall. And it’s just an image of my settings that I copy, every time I open up a session that a couple of things I’m using, I can recall them real quick. And this is kind of what it looks like.

So there, I have the Fearn on this makes the VT-5 boosting the highs of there. So I just go, you know, make sure that everything over there matches real quick. And this has been the biggest lifesaver.When you use so much analogue that it adds variables and that you need to take into account and just make sure that you’re on top of that.

A lot of my friends stay in the box and they do it. It helps me get to where I’m going a little faster. And it’s manageable. A lot of the things have hardware recall, and like software’s like this, like I’m not going crazy. The way I’m doing it definitely takes longer, especially when you’re printing stems, but I can hear an audible difference. And that’s enough for me.

LISTENTO just lives on my template, it’s always on, I have it on my Master Tracks. That’s the last thing if I need to check with this 808 that I’m pushing so much it’s going to sound like on a small speaker, I have it right there. And all I got to do is open this up. Lets play it from the hook. Another really cool thing I do is I don’t even need to let it stop playing. I’ve got my air pods right here

And just like that, you know it’s in the headphones. When I’m done with this, I can walk to my car, I put the air pods back on back in their case. Now I’m connected. If we were in my car be connected to my car without even thinking. You know that’s that’s what it is. It’s it’s convenience and ease and just time-saving.

When I got done with this session with T-Shyne’s vocals, I sent him a link and he was at his studio and he was you know, either making revisions or approving it or just listen to it.

You know, they want to be part of the process. There are times when I don’t want to bounce it and send it because I don’t want them to live with it. Because I’m not done yet but I can send them a link. When we got done with the song he was really happy, streamed it live and signed off on it. We just worked really well together.
“I don’t know if any of us were expecting things to shoot into the stratosphere the way that they have. I’m so so grateful to have been a part of this.” – Jesse Ray Ernster

We’re teaming up with some of the most esteemed producers, engineers and mixers in the game who are lifting the hood behind their biggest hits.

In the latest episode of #TheMakingOf we catch up with Grammy Award-winning mix engineer Jesse Ray Ernster. Jesse gives us an access-all-areas look at the mixing process for Doja’s chart-topping album ‘Planet Her’, describing it as “a game of small subtle tweaks”, embellishing and lifting the impact of the record with small, precise decisions.

Jesse was nominated for five Grammy Awards at last night’s 65th Annual Awards Show, including nominations for ‘Record of The Year’ for his work on Doja Cat’s ‘Woman’, ‘Best Global Music Album’ for ‘Love, Damini’ by Burna Boy, alongside three participation nominations for his work with both Doja Cat & Burna Boy.

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TRANSCRIPT

“So they had the beat sounding a certain way. They have stacks of vocal sounding a certain way, as well as her vocal effects. So a lot of the sound of the record that you hear now was already embedded into that when I received it. There were just a couple of opportunities to just embellish and just add impact.

It’s a game of just small subtle tweaks, the finished vocal that you hear on the masters or on the radio, if not a vocal running through 10 busses and chains of plugins. And with this effect feeding into that, no, absolutely not. It’s an EQ and a compressor, a delay and a reverb all doing very, very little.

She has a controlled delivery, an impeccable mic technique and great tone and the mixers job is to just leave it alone and don’t do too much because it doesn’t need it.

It’s so incredible to see the impact that these recordings have had on other human beings and the culture as a whole and this album and the single, it completely took off and took all of us by surprise.

I don’t know if any of us were expecting things to shoot into the stratosphere the way that they have. I’m so so grateful to have been a part of this.“
We’re teaming up with some of the most esteemed producers, engineers and mixers in the game who are lifting the hood behind their biggest hits.

In the latest episode of #TheMakingOf, Teezio give us an access-all-areas look into the process for mixing the opening track to the album’ ’Till The Wheels Fall Off’, featuring Lil Durk and Capella Grey.

The song touches upon Brown’s relationship with God and very personal challenges in his life, so it was vital Teezio matched that intimacy and depth within the mix.

Teezio takes us through his vocal chain for Chris, the importance of reductive EQing, as well as how he co-mixed the track with his collaborator and close friend, Bainz, by using Audiomovers.

Huge congratulations to Teezio who was nominated for multiple awards at last nights Grammy Awards, including Best R&B Album for his work on Chris Brown’s ‘Breezy’.

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TRANSCRIPT

I want to show you guys a mix session for a song called wheels fall off, which was the first song on the breezy album with Chris Brown. Let’s just jump right into it.

let’s start from the top mix template. As you can see, I’ve delivered this record, obviously, it’s out. So these are the deliverable prints up here. We’ve got my busing my drum buss bass bus, music bus, which sort of everything feeds, which feeds my outboard gear and comes back, we have all the drums here you can see kick, snare rim, down here, we have the 808 in the bass, which in this case, actually, it was two basses on top of each other, I had processing happening on each individual bass, and that processing started to sort of go against each other, and it kind of made the two basses not sit with each other.

So I had to make a decision to inactivate all that and create a bus for both basses to feed and sort of try to treat that as one whole bus with everything on it. That I feel like is a moment where I was put out of my comfort zone, right and I had to do something that normally wouldn’t do.

Music down here you’ll see in pink, which is pianos keys, couple of vocal chops, and then we’re getting into the vocals, these are Chris’s leads for the verse, sort of the part where he says free one and slime, which is here at the top of this verse.

So I’ll show you the EQ, which is a pro-q 3 and you can see I’m shaving off 120, I’m sort of getting all these bad frequencies and just notching them out. Some of these are pretty deep. I mean, you’ve got over a DB cuts, a lot of my E cueing is reductive I don’t, you’re not going to see me adding too much with these sort of EQs.

To make things brighter, you can just reduce low end to make things lower end-y you can just reduce high end, everything has an opposite and equal reaction.

That’s sort of my cutting process with him to cut everything down. Then I take this UAD pultec EQP-1A and I’ll do a 10k boost. And that sort of just opens up that air on his vocal. From there, I’ll limit the vocal or not limit but put it through this 1176 limiting amplifier, which is just a compressor.

After that I bring in this neutron taking away that bottom end in his vocal and allowing the clarity to shine. After that I put the limitless on there, which is a limiter which sort of pushes everything more forward into your face, which people like that sort of intimacy you can have with the vocal.

Once that happens when you push the vocal forward, you’re gonna get things that again start to come out of the vocal, which is where I re-attack and I put a soothe plugin on there.

So we’re having a good amount of reduction. But again, this is all in part of smoothing and cleaning it up. There’s that and I ended off with this C-2 Compressor which I’ll show you again, my reduction is I mean, it’s pretty, it’s a pretty high reduction. Let’s get down here to nine so we can see exactly, I’m doing five DBS of reduction, which is a lot on the compressor.

But when you hear this record again, sonically this record is very in your face, it’s very aggressive. It’s sort of a dark record. Subject-wise it’s sort of a dark record as well, in more r&b type of sound record that Chris might do, there might not be five DBS of reduction, they might be a little more dynamic.

I love mixing for what it needs. I don’t like doing some Well, that’s how I’m supposed to do it. I do it that way every time. That’s not always the case. music isn’t black and white. It’s very grey, as great as it can get.

We’re getting down to more stacks. These are hooks, there’s a choir sort of singing to the wheels fall off. It sounds like a big group of people. That’s what these vocals are.

And then we’re coming down to Durk. So when I got this record, Chris did his parts. We said let’s get Durk on it. We hit Durk. Durk gave us the verse. So that’s when I hit Bainz. And I said, Hey, Bainz, can we can you mix this with me?

So we can call mix it blah, blah here and he knew the whole subject and everything of what was going on. So I sent him the vocals. He makes it we used Audiomovers for him to play back to me. Okay, it sounds dope. Yeah, I think it sounds dope, I’ll make it sit in my mix. Cool. So he sends me back, these vocals which are mixed on his end.

So when he got to me, the vocal had to sort of adjust it and sort of take out some frequencies to get it to sit right within my whole process, I’m more or less just kind of squeezing him into the pocket rather than reducing his dynamics and sort of sitting him in, right.

So this is the last compressor This is the ChikenHead. What that is, is actually a plugin compressor that in real time, sends the audio out to the box, converts it to audio, runs it through like real compressor channel, and then re converts it back into digital all simultaneously in one.

So it’s a crazy I mean, he’s won the tech award, like three years in a row already. Like DSP is on another level. And this is on every record. It always is my finisher. It’s sort of what takes it and glues it and glues it right. It’s like something being flush, right? Like the vocal is more flush with the mix and it doesn’t sound like it’s sticking up. So that’s sort of what this compressor does. And that sort of seals everything off.

And then from there, we’re done right like the mix is done and we’re ready to send it off to the artists for approval. That’s it.
“You can’t fake that!” – Matthew Genovese (Analog in the Digital)

#TheMakingOf is where producers, engineers and mixers lift the hood on their biggest hits, taking us behind the stems within the original sessions. Up next – Writer, Producer, Mixer and collaborator extraordinaire Matthew Genovese.

Introducing Former Blondes: the passion project shared by Genovese and Kiki Halliday, a songwriter and artist based out of Nashville. In this instalment of #TheMakingOf, we explore how upcoming single ‘Pretty Little Thing’ came to be, taking a tour of Matt Genovese’s makeshift echo chamber in the process.

WATCH THE FULL VIDEO:

Timecodes:

Intro: 0:00

Exploring Matt’s Reverb Chamber: 0:35

Microphones used: 1:23

Spring Reverb on Vocals: 2:39

Making mix revisions remotely: 3:42

Using LISTENTO with clients: 4:27
Exceeding 100 million views on YouTube, 150 million streams on Spotify (making it the most popular song by an African artist in the streaming era) and reaching No. 4 on the UK Singles Chart — Afro-fusion giant Burna Boy has everyone in a chokehold with the lead single from his sixth studio album ‘Love, Damini’. And don’t worry, this won’t be the last you’ve heard of it.

Introducing you to our brand-new series: #TheMakingOf.

We’re teaming up with some of the most esteemed producers, engineers and mixers in the game who are lifting the hood behind their biggest hits. In Episode One, Grammy Award-winning mix engineer Jesse Ray Ernster gives us an access-all-areas look into the process for mixing Last Last.

From adding angst and presence to the initial beat to finalising the mixes through his iPhone and Airpod speakers using the LISTENTO mobile player, Jesse reveals just what went into mixing one of the biggest tracks of 2022.

Full transcript:

“I’m Jesse Ray Ernster and I’m going to be showing you the song Last Last by Burna Boy.

I originally mixed this song all in the box, but today we’re exploring kind of a new workflow I’m having fun with lately, and spilling the session out on the console. I thought that it would be really cool to explore this record once again in the analog format. Alright, let’s jump in.

I’m just gonna solo the beat. I’m monitoring pretty quietly, I want to get some balance. I want to get it feeling good. It’s pretty clean, it’s pretty punchy and transient right now, I think we can get the kick a little bit more angry by driving the channel, and I can do that up here by just driving the line in. You know if I really push it, I can hear it [laughs], you know if you don’t push it at all. But we’ll get some drive.

You know, like the way Dre used to push tape. We’ve also got some EQ pushing some of the knocky frequencies around 1K on the kick. You know without…it’s clean….pretty 2000s. Not angry enough. Kick that in, get some of the grind. And same with the snare, the snare’s pretty clean. This sort of rim sound. But if we crunch it, then it becomes this like kind of cool dark thing. And these percussion tracks, these weren’t really hot in the mix, like I don’t know that they were really audible at all. But they really should be. If anything, I regret not really pushing those up in the release, I think those are great.

Also, we’ve got to take a look at the 808s. What’s happening here. Little bit clean, we could drive that channel again as well. And then we can engage a little bit of channel compression to just tighten the transient. We’re not compressing for level regulation, we’re compressing to shape the envelope of the start of the transient point to really help it, you know. So instead of “boom, boom”, we give it the “fuuh, fuuh”. It shapes that.

Alright, we have the beat working now we have the instrumental sounding great. Let’s bring Burna in. And as an engineer, we get to the part where the vocals come in, we’d be really tempted to try out some EQ and some stuff and see what we need. But I have a feeling he doesn’t need much, Burna usually sounds like a legend on his own without a lot of filtering and without a lot of effects.

Let’s try it, let’s try a little bit of EQ and see if we can just improve and subtly refine his vocal sound. It doesn’t need it. That’s just the sound of his voice. He’s a giant. So we’ve unpacked a bit of the tracks individually, and kind of taking a look at all of the instruments and the vocals on the song. I think as a whole now, we could take a look at the mix bus and add a little bit of EQ there. My favorite for this is Mixland Tilt EQ, there’s a 40K high boost that just adds so much sparkle. Let’s hear what that does. Really boosting it. It adds quite a bit of sheen. It just adds a little bit of that air. This is modeled after just amazing pieces of vacuum tube gear you know, and it’s just shiny. It just sounds good. At this stage in the game, if it’s feeling good on speakers and everywhere else I’ll usually get the AirPods out and check on the phone.

And here she is, dearly beloved. We’ve got the LISTENTO plugin, I put it very last in the chain just right at the end to stream the audio to my phone. Pull up the Audiomovers LISTENTO link that I sent to myself and then I’ll just work in AirPods for a bit, and kind of work off of the stream. It sounds great enough to where I can trust it reliably. I can’t tell the difference at all from the session audio to the stream, it’s incredible.

Stream Last Last.

Follow Jesse Ray Ernster:

We visited number-one-selling songwriter and record producer Alina Smith (ITZY, Red Velvet, Fall Out Boy) in her home studio, to delve deeper into the process behind the production and mix of Bathing Suit, by her LYRE MUSIC GROUP counterpart, Elli Moore.

WATCH FULL VIDEO

TRANSCRIPT

Hi, I’m Alina Smith, a writer and producer in LYRE Music Group and today I’m going to be showing you the production on Bathing Suit by Elli Moore.

Okay, the first thing I want to point out here – this is a technique I use on every single song I produce. I have a pretty airy voice, and I use it as a pad quite a bit, so you can hear this here.

I really advocate for people using their voices and their natural qualities to enhance their productions and h ere I basically stack several parts, to add a little bit of ‘oomph’ to this post-chorus.

So I accomplish this very simply. Obviously starts with the voice. You have to sing, you know in a soft, airy way. I also use Valhalla Shimmer plugin by Valhalla DSP. It’s one of my favourites, it really does add a shimmer on top of the track. It’s very oddly named.

And I use Center by Waves, which is one of my favourite plugins for vocals. It helps me get background vocals out of the way of the leads by spreading them to the side. This is what it sounds like without processing. As you can tell, quite dull, and this is it with it on. Big difference.

Okay, another technique that I use, pretty much in every song, some people call this chants, I call this gangs. It can be like a ‘yeah’ ‘uh’ like a kind of a yell thing. Or it’s like chanty type of singing, like we have this hook here.

So obviously, we’re trying to emphasise that ‘la la la’ hook and this is a really good way to do it. So the way I’ve accomplished this is the two of us are basically singing these gangs together in the room.

One of the things though, that makes these gangs for me is the processing. So I have this chain here that I just called ‘Dirty Gang’.

It starts with Decapitator which is a saturation plugin, and then I will take away the lowest part of the frequency range and the highest part of the frequency range.

Then I use my favourite plugin ever, which is Valhalla vintage verb I am known as the ‘Valhalla back girl’. And here I’m just adding a bit of this reverb, you know, a pretty high decay three seconds is pretty significant.

And then we have Center which again spreads it a bit more to the sides . This is what it sounds like with all the processing on.

There is another technique I want to show you guys that also has to do with using your voice as an instrument. It’s basically singing and re-pitching to make almost like a synth part out of a voice. So I’ll play you guys this pre-chorus part of the song.

So if you listen close, there is a part underneath here that is sort of this very high pitched, floating kind of vocal. This could have been accomplished with the synth, but I chose to just sing this in and process it in a way that makes it sound like this weird like processed synthy high thing.

We have really great mix and mastering engineers we work with. A lot of the time, the engineers will do the bulk of the work on their own. But we will get together with them on Zoom using LISTENTO and we will give notes and they can just in real time, fix those final tweaks for us.

WATCH FULL VIDEO

TRANSCRIPT

WATCH FULL VIDEO

TRANSCRIPT

Timecodes:

Full transcript:

“I’m Jesse Ray Ernster and I’m going to be showing you the song Last Last by Burna Boy.

I originally mixed this song all in the box, but today we’re exploring kind of a new workflow I’m having fun with lately, and spilling the session out on the console. I thought that it would be really cool to explore this record once again in the analog format. Alright, let’s jump in.