The immaturity and ego displayed here is quite extraordinary. A new low on GS. That is saying something....

<Troll removed; comment redundant>

anyway I actually agree with you re: wanting Serban to be more open about his technical process, especially as people like Manny Marroquin and Greg Wells speak about it often. He doesn't even need to release The Vocal Chain or even mention plugins, I'd just love to hear how he approaches new files and what kinds of techniques he uses to get everything sounding so alive.

Very good summary. Thanks.

Don’t you guys get it?

N1Greg has surpassed the need to learn from others. His unprecedented wisdom has allowed him to transcend the physical and merge with the universal consciousness.

It won’t be long before he formulates a Top 40 hit without ever making a sound at all, using pure alpha brainwave energy to manifest a mix that’s so spectrally pristine it literally wipes Spotify off the face of this earth.

Let's just put him on the ignore list and not entertaining his trolling behavior guys.

I really like what Fred's takeaway post.

I really hope they do it again. All of them gave great insight on how to support artist and to help them keep being productive.

I'm gonna share the video to some artists friends.

I was a little bummed it didn't go in depth, but I realize that they're trying to provide a foundation on how to support the creative process during this tough time.

..... thanks very much for sharing that info.

i wondered if you could help me out re: the third and fourth links you posted please? they both lead to main web pages of the sites and having done a preliminary keyword search for the articles (that are also linked in other (Far lesser forums) ....it appears the linked pages have been moved to somewhere i can't find.

(Or i should wake up more before i post)



I am just beginning my own research into serban as a result of studying some of max martins songwriting technique.....and i had no idea serban mixed blackstreet....

i love the balance of mid/late 90s r and b ....its a sound Khalid and the engineer Denis Kosiak have brought back with great success IMO.

Im aware of katy perrys dark horse...and uptown funk obviously .but i don't listen to much commercial pop casually, as i find the genre a bit overwhelming musically, lol. So much incredible skill and technique and musical knowledge applied to quickly disposed art.

(said with respect for the trade and to qualify, I'm talking industry created artists....not songwriters)

so ill dive into his old r and b stuff first if there's more out there.


Its also been helpful to catch site of a few mentions on here as to his attention to the 200hz point ....ill have a little gander at that in my current projects.


Im aware from bob power of the pultec eq1 c.60hz boost and adding a little bump/dip in front of any corresponding boost/dip elsewhere in the low mids.

...and the 250 and 450 dips seth firkins spoke of....


Im currently enjoying chucking out all my "analogue style " plug ins and keeping it all as clean and surgical as poss.....eq and compressions wise. I don't think i use any eq that's not dynamic except for the bob power/pultec style 60hz boost and a McDSP filterbank on my buses

...all compression is side chained or paralleled ...a standard from my uk club music roots...(except a little "mixed into " -2db max on a 2:1 ratio with the ssl six which i run the 2bus mix thru to max out headroom, having summed through the ssl and the folcrum, ......which is fun )

dynamic eq has pretty much replaced all my insert compression at this point and along with (mike dean inspired) accurate/content-based drum tuning and eq points correlated to the harmonic frequencies of which key the music is in....


slowly getting there .....and loooooving the science behind it all.



but i come from a musical world where if you don't have a sub you're basically not involved in the party (drum and bass, garage ...r and b / hip-hop) ..and

to quote the great , late nate dogg....

"the rhythm is the bass and the bass is the melody"....


so getting THAT to translate onto a phone speaker..lols.

...i think mixed by ali has the goods at the mo, for my taste


...and have been a long time fan of kerri chandler and dennis ferrers mixes ....Nasser Bakers doing good things at the mo too.


...and bob katz's book on mastering is actually revising my intermediate knowledge of proper mixing techniques ...id highly recommend it to anyone at my stage of learning.

Best take way...any eq that requires more than a +/-0.5 db change...theres something wrong with the mix.


Anyhoo, sorry for the meandering post.....




The 200hz bump should give me some fun with the eq today



....thanks again for that info.

have a good day

The troll has left the building.

Or the thread, I forget which.

He commented elsewhere that he “doesn’t come on this thread anymore”.

So I thought I’d just help with his resolve.

Woof dude, buy me diner first. I’m gonna forward this to all the labels I work for. I’d hate to hear what you’d say to CLA or David Bendeth

Can he just buy you dinner rather than a whole diner?

Ok, ok - So that's why Serban's high end is so amazing, so silky...

Dear Serban Ghenea. You are here somewhere, I know. I do not know your nickname in the GS. Show setup or something, please.

After that shakedown, the least he can do is the whole diner. At the very least first dibs at brunch service post COVID

This was my favourite part by the way, the part where the pot called the kettle black.

sitting here on hold waiting for the Next Available Representative and I did tally marks for the past seven pages of this thread. Comments by, about and responding to our resident troll were running two to one against posts actually about Serban Ghenea or his mixing. That includes two pages with a lot of people live-tweeting the webinar. Any posts about mixing "in general" that were disconnected from the bickering went into the SG column.

I wish SG had mixed this hold music. It's dreadful and catchy at the same time.

WHAT?!?

you butchered the line mate, it’s

“The rhythm is the bass and the bass is the TREBLE”

oops I stand corrected

.....memory failed me

apologies....

Either way , the low end is the anchor

I used the metric halo channel strip tdm to eq and comp that vox. I was referencing a Serban mix. You can't reach his sound. My sound it's just average compare to him. Bytheway client was happy and payed.

https://youtu.be/z-pq3tgNL9k

I think we are forgetting that the average productions that some of us get to mix have nothing to do with the productions mixers like Serban are getting.

Yes, he is a genius, but I think that recieving the Bruno Mars 24K Magic Pro tools sessions to mix makes the job easier to get to that pro sound. You have to be really bad to screw it up.

I mean, if I have to mix an unknown/amateur indie band, which I may have tracked or not, the quality of that song/production/tracking will be so much lower than something done by Bruno Mars/Mark Ronson.

The songs I get to mix are not international hits, they lack of any memorable and catchy chorus, don’t have the instrument execution level of a top of the chart song, and the arrangement is probably more mundane. No matter how good I’m mixing (which I’m not by the way, cause if I were, my work would have more demand), I will never be able to make it sound like the big boys. Even they couldn’t.

I think that more than one of you would have a nice surprise if they had 24k Magic raw tracks and mix it.

Hey, I spent some time trying to recreate the SG mix of Love me Harder from the unmixed stems, so that they null as much as possible. The steps to recreate what i found (if you find the stems) are:

Step 1 -- add MH channel strip to every channel, LPF at 17.5k ... a lot of channels perfectly nulled with just this. No further EQ got anything closer (i tried on each channel)

Step 2 -- automate levels of a few things in different sections by 0.5dB max, to get things nulling as much as possible.

And that's it. Here's a file of the difference I was left with after doing that, except boosted by 16.5dB coz the differences were very quiet. Hopefully this link is allowed... (BTW it's silent for like the first 20sec coz he hadn't done anything at all to that section clearly.)



With all the drums for eg, I had a perfect null on most of the elements within the drum stem, so what you can hear that's left is possible something he'd added on a parallel chain (basically just a bit of extra punch). Also the bass I think he'd maybe added extra sidechain OR extra distortion, but I couldnt find a setting that made the null any better. I'm sure whatever it is is very subtle.

Otherwise, most all you hear is the level rides on the vocals, which is interesting but pretty simple still. Seems like he really did almost nothing to it, so I guess he thought that Max Martin's mix was close to perfect anyway. Obviously that wouldnt be the case with all producers, haha...


Would be interested to see if anyone has further thoughts on the difference file.

Fun experiment. It really goes to show that the difference between a great record and a not great one happens long before the mixer ever touches it. In addition, a lot of what makes great engineers great is knowing when to leave a good thing well enough alone.

Well said Kyle.

That gives the recording engineer and the producer a little extra kudos.

Cheers

If even Serban gives you all his settings, presets and tools do you really think you will mix like him?

Of course not. You should listen like him, hear like him, have his experience and so on. Even that wouldn’t be enough.

You could learn a lot from him and still at the end it’s gonna be a different result. Not bad, different, maybe be good, maybe even better, but not the same. There is no magic elixir, channel strip, reverb, resonance remover, compressor, EQ that will make you a good engineer.

This webinar was great and they said exactly what is important today, nobody was bored, all of them were listening to each other and all were very respectful.

They were all truly professional and respectful and no one would expect any less.
But i bet money part 2 will never come, unless their obligation to the Grammy crew is beyond their control.

It seemed pretty poorly designed to me to have that level of talent ‘in the room’ and yack about the surface beginner stuff they did.
If their market was inexperienced producers and songwriters and beginning home recordists (Which is who they were talking to it seemed) they should have had a different panel.
Weird to me that ‘The Grammys’ couldn’t put together the market with the product a bit better than that.

As far as I know they planned Q&A for at least 30 minutes, maybe more. But it never came to it, really. Why? They talked about the things that are most important for them. As somebody said already it wasn’t GS oriented webinar

Nice Otari, by the way!

thank you

Thanks! Its a nice board.

I’m missing these big things mine were PM2000-3000 and I’m still using D5000 and Rev7!

Nice. My Rev7 got noisey so i replaced it with another spx-990. I adore those things.
Ive actually found a pretty damn close alt for the symphonic preset in these boxes....
https://tal-software.com/products/tal-chorus-lx
Not quite as active but widens nice and has a similar tone.

Nice! Thank you, I’ll check it out. Symphonic is very unique.

I was able to model d5000 vocal templates 1 and 2 in KHz plugin ( Slate bundle), but just that, too many options to use, although it’s not that hard.

Nice. I just used vx template 2 in a mix last week.
I tried to get an ir from symphonic and my computer burst into flames....