Jeff Ellis: Creative Mixing Masterclass [Frank Ocean, The Neighbourhood, Odd Future, Nick Jonas]

Welcome to a week of Masterclasses! This week I’m going to write down my key takeaways from a handful of masterclasses that I have bookmarked in a YouTube playlist. I’ve watched a number of masterclasses, but these few are the ones I’ve saved and watched several times. They’re also the classes with the most points that have stuck in my mind.

Key Takeaways

when listening to the rough mix, what can we keep and what can we improve
when you remodel a house, you don’t bulldoze the whole thing, you keep what’s good
hippocratic oath on the rough mix :D
“moments of glory”, key moments in the song that you want to enhance as an event
imagining where on stage the players are at a given time
gets all stems 100% wet, you pick up where the producer left off (you can always go back and print a dry stem if needed)
tries to have the producer and artist at every mix session, being collaborative
to get 4 song elements to have their own space, he hard pans 2 of the elements left and right, then has an autopanner move the other elements left->right to create movement but offset to be opposites (getting things out of the way of the vocals)
“ambience mismatch”, i.e. the vocals and drums sounded like they were in different sized rooms (can sometimes be cool, but can be confusing to your brain)
arrangement transition– during the transition from chorus to verse, the reverb goes from huge to zero
strings sounded a little “virtual instrument-y”, so shaped the reverb of the stem to be as loud as (or louder than) the transient (attack) of the chugging strings
one of biggest pet peeves, “when a hi-hat is hi-hatting right on top of the vocals”, but also doesn’t want to pan it to the side, so uses stereo imaging (the haas effect) to spread out the hi-hat
uses “Soundways LowLeveler” plugin to enhance the bass, explains that he sometimes prefers plugins that are just a knob or slider to keep it simple, i.e. make it brighter with one knob
when I’m mixing, I solo so rarely
there was a clap track, matching the backbeat, and he highlighted making a single clap 6db louder to help subtly emphasis a different section of the arrangement
this mix was from 2 years prior to the masterclass, so he reflects on how he used to be in a phase where he’d add plugins just to add them– points to using a compressor on the drums just to do it, but realizes now that the drums were fine on their own, and are sample based so it’s not like the dynamics are moving around and they already sound good
thinks compressors are the most overrated things in mixing
feels like he becomes more of a minimalist over time
rather than use a de-esser, he’ll clip gain the S’s down in volume
also tends to be bolder with the mix bus and VCA group processing as time goes on, using dramatic plugins there