MIKE PAYNE: So last, it's time to make some hair metal. Each member of the Crosstalk crew died a little inside last week where we were recording a hair metal bumper for the Gearwire videos.

DREW KRAG: That ain't no joke.

MIKE PAYNE: But it was all in good fun and we're here to finish it up live on the air in a good, old mixing session.

DAN AGOSTO: Okay. All right, so we're going to be using Blue Cat's Dynamics. Have you guys seen this stuff at all?

MIKE PAYNE: No.

DAN AGOSTO: Blue Cat's dynamics plugins?

MIKE PAYNE: No.

BRITTON WETHERALD: No.

DREW KRAG: I've seen it. I haven't heard it.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah. These are actually pretty cool. I was messing with these. This is basically just a sidechainable compressor and you can see the compression curve that I've already set up on our drums, and so basically what I've done is I've routed our drums to a bus and then put the processor on there, and what I'll do is I'll bypass the effect as soon as I loop it, and we'll hear it dry first, and you guys just tell me what do you think of the sound quality. We'll solo that. Okay.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS BACK DRUM TRACK FROM CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION PROCESSED WITH THE BLUE CAT AUDIO DYNAMICS PLUGIN BYPASSED]

DAN AGOSTO: So that's our -- this is bypassed, and I'm going to turn it on. It's sort of solo right now but it's here I bumped it up.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Mmm hmm.

DREW KRAG: Mmm hmm.

DAN AGOSTO: So, if we looked at this plugin, we got a sidechain filter so what I'll do is I'll lower the threshold of the compression curve so it's a little more obvious, and what I want to do now with the sidechain compression is make it so it's just going off the kick, which is compressing off the kick, so I turn on the listen and now we're just going to be listening to what we're filtering out and what's going to be feeding the compressor.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS BACK DRUM TRACK FROM CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION PROCESSED THROUGH BLUE CAT AUDIO DYNAMICS PLUGIN]

BRITTON WETHERALD: That's sweet.

DAN AGOSTO: All right, so turn that up, so now we can hear that it is still compressing. This is clean, and this is --

BRITTON WETHERALD: You can kind of hear the modulation a little bit.

DAN AGOSTO: You can, you can. What we can do to prevent that, here we got a mode.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah.

DAN AGOSTO: You can change to VCA mode, kind of makes it a little more transparent.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah, yeah.

DAN AGOSTO: A little bit.

BRITTON WETHERALD: [LAUGHING]

DAN AGOSTO: It's got a stereo spreader so you can flip your stereo image. This one is called max.

MIKE PAYNE: Yeah, in there. Right there.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah. You can hear it loop every single time. It modulates in the same place.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah. Minimum sort of squeezes down your stereo image. Average I think keeps it, just spreads it out a little bit perhaps, not exactly sure. There' also an oversampling knob. Right now, it's two stages of oversampling and what this does is it affects the filter mostly I think, the sound with the filter.

BRITTON WETHERALD: They seem like very in-depth plugins but nice at the same time.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah, and they're not so expensive, so [OVERLAPPING].

MIKE PAYNE: How are they in processing?

DAN AGOSTO: Right now, I got like 42%. I got a filter on, I got a sidechain filter on, and I'm doing some pretty heavy compression.

MIKE PAYNE: Right.

BRITTON WETHERALD: That's good.

DAN AGOSTO: But let's take a listen to --

BRITTON WETHERALD: Isn't that Roger Nichols stuff?

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

DAN AGOSTO: What I'm going to do is I'm going to turn on the high cut filter, so here's completely open. It's at 22 Hz.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Okay.

DAN AGOSTO: So here's closed, and we're oversampling, and if I needed a little bit of, you know, a little more space on the CPU, I'll turn down to oversampling but listen to what it does to the sound especially when the filter is on.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS BACK DRUM TRACK FROM CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION PROCESSED THROUGH BLUE CAT AUDIO DYNAMICS PLUGIN]

DAN AGOSTO: Did you hear that all? I'm going to switch back and forth to zero. Just two. Mostly the cymbals. I'm going to turn the sidechain filter off for now, and just turn up the gain a little bit so we can hear it.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah, it opens it up a little bit.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah. It actually -- basically all that does is it creates the frequencies -- it allows the frequencies above, you know, the sampling rate, to go through.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah.

DAN AGOSTO: It's very subtle but it is a very nice option to have.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah. it' very useful when you really need those harmonics.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Like if you were doing guitar, it would be extremely important like the cymbals got a little more life with that.

DAN AGOSTO: Over here in the mode section, you can switch between VCA and Opto. VCA is a little more like your '80s sound, what you're going to find on like an SSL board.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Or Neve.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah. Opto is like opto circuit, adds some more distortion.

BRITTON WETHERALD: It's like your Gem Equalizer.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah, and then over here you got peak and RMS. I believe this is just sort of like the response time, the response to the peak, you know, whether the sensor circuit is looking at the peaks or the average loudness. If you turn this up, it's going to become a little slower and a bit heavier of a compressor.

DREW KRAG: Mmm hmm.

DAN AGOSTO: I kind of like that for the sound. You have to turn on the post gain though, and over here is actually our controls for our dynamics.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Mmm hmm.

DAN AGOSTO: This has a gate or expander as you can see. As I turn up the threshold for the lower curve, you can actually gate out some of that stuff. If I turn the ratio down, it'll do expansion instead of gating, and there's also knee control but we don't need that in this case. Over here, we have an upper curve control that's basically compression. We have our threshold, ratio so we can actually do reverse compression, or that's actually expansion as well in a sense, but we're going to leave it about there, and our knee control so we can kind of round off the curve. Now we're constantly compressing basically but to a lesser degree.

BRITTON WETHERALD: What's the price tag around that?

DAN AGOSTO: This thing? I think the entire bundle sells for about 50 bucks.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah, that's areally good deal.

DREW KRAG: That is a good deal.

MIKE PAYNE: Wow.

DAN AGOSTO: And yeah, there's a few -- I believe this is the only -- This is just 50 bucks right here.

MIKE PAYNE: Mmm hmm. Okay.

DAN AGOSTO: One other thing -- a couple of other things on here. If we do some really heavy compression just like completely slam it and turn the ratio up more and turn the knee down, so we're just -- this is just totally slammed like all the time, you can hear that. You can mix between wet and dry.

MIKE PAYNE: That's good. Hmm.

DREW KRAG: That's cool. That's good

DAN AGOSTO: So now we have that compressed sound mix for the other one, and there's also limiter. You can switch between a hard and soft one whether that's harder, that's softer, basically attack time, and here's the release time.

MIKE PAYNE: That's sweet. That's really cool.

DAN AGOSTO: So, it's pumped up really [OVERLAPPING] quite a bit.

DREW KRAG: Mmm hmm.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah it's good. It's good. I mean like honestly -- I mean for the -- for what it is, for 50 bucks, it sounds awesome. I mean like I was just thinking about it. As much as I hate Roger Nichols and as much as I hate the way those plugins operate, they do sound good for exorbitant amounts of money, but I'd put my money on that any day.

DAN AGOSTO: Okay, so we have our drums sounding all right. Now we're going to go into -- we're just going to see how it sounds with the rest of the mix.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS BACK ENTIRE CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION WITH DRUMS PROCESSED THROUGH BLUE CAT AUDIO DYNAMICS PLUGIN]

DAN AGOSTO: I'm kind of a [INDISCERNIBLE] your vocals for now.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Please do yourself. [LAUGHING]

DAN AGOSTO: All right.

MIKE PAYNE: It seems like the guitars are a little loud.

BRITTON WETHERALD: What? [LAUGHING]

MIKE PAYNE: It seems like the guitars are a little loud.

BRITTON WETHERALD: [LAUGHING]

DAN AGOSTO: [OVERLAPPING] down a little bit.

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

DAN AGOSTO: All right, so our guitar tracks...

DREW KRAG: That's not me here. That's not me.

DAN AGOSTO: ...right here, I'm going to group these guitar tracks and just sort of bring them down.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS BACK ENTIRE CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION WITH DRUMS PROCESSED THROUGH BLUE CAT AUDIO DYNAMICS PLUGIN]

DAN AGOSTO: No. That's bass. I'll leave the solo track up a bit.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING BACK ENTIRE CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION]

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

DAN AGOSTO: Cool.

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING BACK ENTIRE CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION]

BRITTON WETHERALD: [SCREAMING] Ow!

DAN AGOSTO: All right, so this is bringing back memories of last week.

DREW KRAG: [LAUGHING]

BRITTON WETHERALD: Dude, it's really '80s. I mean it's really '80s.

DAN AGOSTO: This is the mixing process, yeah. Listening over and over again to music...

BRITTON WETHERALD: The same. Yeah.

DAN AGOSTO: ...you may not necessarily like.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's --

DAN AGOSTO: I'm going to solo these guitar tracks, and I'm going to send them to a new guitar bus. To do that, I'll just choose track properties>output and then send those three to guitar, and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to EQ all these guitars together.

DREW KRAG: Interesting.

DAN AGOSTO: And to do that, I'm going to go to our Blue Cat. Let's do the Stereo Parametric EQ, or actually the Parametric EQ Stereo.

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

DAN AGOSTO: All right [LAUGHING]

BRITTON WETHERALD: [LAUGHING]

DREW KRAG: [LAUGHING]

MIKE PAYNE: [LAUGHING]

DAN AGOSTO: So, as you guys can see, this is a standard parametric EQ.

MIKE PAYNE: Right.

DAN AGOSTO: I'm going to go ahead and do turn on each band.

BRITTON WETHERALD: It reminds me a lot of the Waves design of things.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah. Uh, this kind of reminds me of the Waves design up here.

MIKE PAYNE: Their Q10.

DAN AGOSTO: So, for guitar I kind of like something around 1000 Hz sort of that telephone frequency, maybe a little higher to get them to kind of cut through, and right now I should be EQing these in the mix, so what I'm going to do is I'll bring back the rest of the mix.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING BACK ENTIRE CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION, ADJUSTING EQ FOR GUITARS]

DAN AGOSTO: And I'm just going to EQ until I start to really feel that guitar.

BRITTON WETHERALD: It's got to bump a little four in.

DAN AGOSTO: 4k?

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah. Just a little.

DAN AGOSTO: All right, so I'll bring a little bit of 4k -- Oh, not 4k. Four hundred Hz or 4 [OVERLAPPING]?

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah, 400. Sorry.

DAN AGOSTO: Four hundred. Okay.

BRITTON WETHERALD: I was like what --

MIKE PAYNE: Same thing.

DAN AGOSTO: Let's see how that sounds.

DREW KRAG: [LAUGHING]

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING BACK ENTIRE CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION, ADJUSTING EQ FOR GUITARS]

BRITTON WETHERALD: I just want to see if it kind of gives it some low end.

DAN AGOSTO: Basically, you can see all it's doing is adding some extra mid end, or just mid range. I'm going to lower the low shelf just because we don't really have anything whatever we want, and a good thing about being able to turn each band on and off is you can listen to what we're doing, so you really don't hear much of a difference, but since we're getting rid of that, it's good. If I were to go up higher, you start to hear that.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Ooh.

DAN AGOSTO: We can listen to just what we're doing with that one, that particular band, so I'm going to turn it back down to around 143, make sure that we're not cutting out anything we want. All right, that's good.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Now the bass is going to take that place.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah, that's where the bass lives. Let's try moving up some of these highs. Nope we don't like that.

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

DAN AGOSTO: There's plenty of high end in that guitar. Let's try taking out a little bit, and moving up our shelf.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING BACK ENTIRE CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION, ADJUSTING EQ FOR GUITARS]

DAN AGOSTO: Maybe let's do it at that. Makes it a little smoother I think and just bump up the gain just a little bit.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING BACK ENTIRE CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION, ADJUSTING EQ FOR GUITARS]

DAN AGOSTO: And maybe a little more of that 400 to get those rhythm guitars standing out.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Try moving the 1k to like 1.5.

DAN AGOSTO: At 1.5?

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah.

DAN AGOSTO: You know, the 1k is actually at 1.6.

BRITTON WETHERALD: All right.

DAN AGOSTO: You want to move it up some more?

BRITTON WETHERALD: Just a little.

DAN AGOSTO: Expect 2k.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah. It's not really noticeable. I mean it's --

DAN AGOSTO: Well, I mean you can hear what it's doing. It's obviously doing something and I think you like that.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah. Cool.

DAN AGOSTO: So, we've Q'd the guitars using that one. We'll bring it down a little bit here. Okay, cool. And what else we're going to do? Let's add some of this MS EQ to the drums, and what this MS EQ does is called the widening parametric EQ. It looks a lot like the other EQ.

BRITTON WETHERALD: But it's got more.

DREW KRAG: Yeah. Nice.

DAN AGOSTO: Well, it's got two channels, but the channels are not traditionally like left and right. The top one is your middle channel and the bottom is your side channel.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Oh yeah.

DAN AGOSTO: So, if we press play, we can sort of effect what's in the middle, so let's say we want to, on our toms which are panned stereo, what we want to do is add like 100 Hz so that they start to ring out, and on those fills, instead of being like [IMITATING DULL TOM SOUNDS], they'll be like [IMITATING BRIGHT TOM SOUNDS]. That's kind of what we want. So what I'm going to do is just bump up 100 Hz on the side channels, and you can hear that it's really not doing anything -- or actually I just turned it off -- It's really not doing anything to our kick or snare. Can you hear that?

BRITTON WETHERALD: It's not. Yeah. It's creating some added saturation but it's doing very minimal.

DAN AGOSTO: It's doing something but it's very minimal.

MIKE PAYNE: [OVERLAPPING]

DREW KRAG: [OVERLAPPING]

BRITTON WETHERALD: [OVERLAPPING]

DAN AGOSTO: It gets our toms, which I think is cool.

BRITTON WETHERALD: That's a very cool plugin, right? Just right there.

DAN AGOSTO: And our mid band, our middle section, what I'm going to do is turn up some 80 Hz because that's where our kick is, and it's really not going to do too much to our toms.

MIKE PAYNE: You got to turn it on.

DAN AGOSTO: That's one thing about this plugin. You got to turn on a band before it starts to work. Turn up the bandwidth.

MIKE PAYNE: Actually that's affecting the bass too.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah, because I have the bass on this too. So what I'm going to do is actually put the bass on its own bus. To new stereo bus, all right.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING BACK ENTIRE CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION]

DAN AGOSTO: So now I'll be able to bring out the kick drum. You can already hear that's happening. That's off. That's on. Turn it up some more.

DREW KRAG: There you go.

MIKE PAYNE: Yeah.

BRITTON WETHERALD: You got that beater head.

DAN AGOSTO: And let's say I just want to add some 5k to the snare. I mean I could go and do this individually...

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah.

DAN AGOSTO: By rendering out each drum by itself but why am I not going to do that? Because it takes too much time. So, I'm going to turn on band 5 in the middle band, and that's actually a little too much on those toms so I want to turn that down a little bit, and back on our mid band, I'm going to go up to about 5k, and it's really not affecting our ride too much. It's affecting it a little bit but minimally, and it's really bringing out that kick.

MIKE PAYNE: Snare.

DAN AGOSTO: Or not the kick, the snare.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING BACK ENTIRE CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION]

MIKE PAYNE: Can you turn it off for a second?

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah.

DAN AGOSTO: I'll turn off the band.

DREW KRAG: Yeah.

BRITTON WETHERALD: You're losing some of the bass on that snare that I think really kind of adds to it.

DAN AGOSTO: See, if I start adding like the part of the snare I want to add like 400, it'll start bringing up the kick drum too, and then it'll cover up the bass guitar.

BRITTON WETHERALD: That's true.

DAN AGOSTO: All right, cool. What else am I going to do? Well, let's go back to our bass and put a little compression on there.

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

DAN AGOSTO: Oh, not here. That's your vocals.

DREW KRAG: [LAUGHING]

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah. Let's please just not ever talk about that ever again. It's like going to embarrass me.

DAN AGOSTO: It's going to be on the end of every one of our videos. So, I'm going to go to the monophonic dynamics.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Well, they can deal with it. I don't want to deal with it.

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

DAN AGOSTO: And I'm just going to grab a preset here, bass boost, and we raise the threshold a little bit, turn off the auto gain because what auto gain does is whenever you turn down the threshold, it gives you make-up gain.

BRITTON WETHERALD: I don't like that.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah. I'm not a big fan of that myself, but it can help, you know, if you want to do something really quick. So that sounds all right for our bass guitar. Sounds good enough.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING BACK ENTIRE CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION]

DAN AGOSTO: As it sits in our mix, maybe give it a little more volume. I'll probably EQ that if we got more time. Anyway, I think our keyboard sounds all right.

MIKE PAYNE: I'd drop the volume just to touch.

DAN AGOSTO: On the keyboard or on the bass?

MIKE PAYNE: Yeah. On the keyboard.

DAN AGOSTO: Ha ha because you played it?

MIKE PAYNE: No, I just -- I don't feel that it entirely fits with the rest of the track.

DAN AGOSTO: All right.

MIKE PAYNE: But it might be good just to see where it would lose the mix.

DAN AGOSTO: I would probably change...

BRITTON WETHERALD: The patch.

DAN AGOSTO: ...change the patch.

MIKE PAYNE: Yeah. That would be sweet.

DAN AGOSTO: Or change the effect entirely.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Go for that Oberheim-like Van Halen sound.

DAN AGOSTO: Well, what I'll do is I'll bring out one of my standards that I always go to, and this is the Dreamstation that comes with Sonar, most versions of Cakewalk software. What we'll do is we'll find a pad.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Jump [IMITATING THE SYNTH RIFF FROM VAN HALEN'S "JUMP"]

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

BRITTON WETHERALD: That's all Oberheim. That's all the Oberheim stuff, man.

DAN AGOSTO: You want to click on some keys?

MIKE PAYNE: Sure.

[MIKE PAYNE AUDITIONING SOME SOUNDS ON THE DREAMSTATION WITH DAN AGOSTO TWEAKING]

DREW KRAG: [LAUGHING]

DAN AGOSTO: Is that what we're looking for?

MIKE PAYNE: No.

DREW KRAG: Pretty close. Similar.

DAN AGOSTO: Getting closer.

DREW KRAG: More paddy, right?

MIKE PAYNE: Yeah. More paddy.

[MIKE PAYNE AUDITIONING SOME SOUNDS ON THE DREAMSTATION WITH DAN AGOSTO TWEAKING]

BRITTON WETHERALD: Like strings.

DREW KRAG: Close. Yeah.

DAN AGOSTO: We'll raise the filter on this or add some FM modulation.

[MIKE PAYNE AUDITIONING SOME SOUNDS ON THE DREAMSTATION WITH DAN AGOSTO TWEAKING]

DREW KRAG: That's pretty close. It's better than I think what was there.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah. It does work. Let's give it a try.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Let's do it.

DREW KRAG: Let's hear what that does.

DAN AGOSTO: We'll just reroute the MIDI track from the Cheeze Machine, which we had before, to the Dreamstation, and see how that sounds.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING BACK ENTIRE CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION, KEYBOARD MIDI TRACK REROUTED TO THE DREAMSTATION]

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

DAN AGOSTO: We'll mix it down.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah, mix it down.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING BACK ENTIRE CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION, KEYBOARD MIDI TRACK REROUTED TO THE DREAMSTATION AND MIXED DOWN]

DAN AGOSTO: That's definitely closer.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah. That's a very close one.

MIKE PAYNE: Yeah. Yeah.

DAN AGOSTO: I'll mix it down a little more.

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah.

DAN AGOSTO: All right. So --

BRITTON WETHERALD: I guess it totally worked out because I did not actually have to play anything. I would just sit there mess around with the POD.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah. I think we got a pretty good mix there.

MIKE PAYNE: Yeah.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah.

DAN AGOSTO: So, what we'll do is --

MIKE PAYNE: What about the vocals?

DAN AGOSTO: So, we'll deal with the vocals later.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah, away from --

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

BRITTON WETHERALD: We don't want to subject you to that right now.

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

BRITTON WETHERALD: Well subject you to it later.

DAN AGOSTO: What we'll probably do with the vocals is compress them, EQ them a bit, and put some reverb on them.

BRITTON WETHERALD: And maybe mute them.

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

DAN AGOSTO: Then what I'll do is I'll edit it out, edit out, you know, certain parts and just kind of space it out within there, but you know we don't want to get into too much editing right now. We're talking about mixing.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah.

MIKE PAYNE: Yeah.

DREW KRAG: Yeah.

DAN AGOSTO: Okay.

DREW KRAG: Agreed.

MIKE PAYNE: All right. Well, thanks everybody for listening and watching. We will be back in a couple of weeks. We're going to take a break next week but thanks everybody for listening in and thank you guys, as always, for taking part.

DREW KRAG: Happy holidays.

MIKE PAYNE: Happy holidays, everybody.