Sometimes you just have to go outside the box. When I'm near the end of a mix and struggling to get the vocal seated, sometimes I'll get it nestled, where it feels great but just starts losing intelligibility, then create a send straight from the lead vocal channel to the master bus, and crack it open til i can *just* hear the details. You get the best of both worlds. Other times, in pursuit of that glue to seat the vocal, I'll take the vocal delay and mix some of the direct signal back into it. It helps create cohesion (aka masking, lol) to seat the vocal. Thanks for great tips as always Bobby, you rock!!! ❤

Thanks Doc! I just tried this on a mix and it sounds amazing, lifts the whole song. One of your best secrets ever!

Nice work, my man... yes yes yes! we all want heads to bob, and this dynamic energy keeps things cooking, keeps those wheels turning

I've been doing this for years. Works great. Good tip. 👍

It's a fantastic tip. CLA does this but with regular EQ. He calls it the "power boost" or "parallel EQ" And he puts a widener on it as well. On Carrie Underwood's Smoke Break he uses it only on the chorus which is clearly heard. It sounds like masterbus level automation but it's not. Appreciate your videos, Bobby. Been watching all your snare videos lately and putting it to use.

Brilliant as always. Thank you, sir

Bringing the bacon as usual Bobby! Good stuff man! Will try this on my next mix!

WOW BOOOOOOOOOB!!!! that double eq trick is actually brilliant! Reminds me to the SSL E 8k eq boost into the channel compressor but more versatile. Thank you as always! I've bought the Korneff's plugin of the wowthing you reviewed last week and took my work to an entire new level(client's words) I owe you a few beers/cigars/whatever!! :D

Dropping gold like always Bobby thanks 🤘

This is great advice to help individual self-belief and to work things out for your mix with your own belief and confidence.

The pursuit is endless! Nutha cool vid! Thanx db!!!

Very interesting tip, can't wait to try it!

Very interesting! I actually tried to do that on a track I was mixing and it worked well (added some saturation too :) Thanks!

Thanks Doc! Great vid as always.. very much appreciate the advice and techniques, have a great week 🙏🕊️😎

Hey, that definitely added body to my mix! Thanks!

Very cool concept. Thank you!

Wow - never thought about 'Parallel EQ-ing' - very cool and useful! Thanks Bobby - and hello from a 'neighbor' down in Fairview - about 40 mins from you!

Great one. I tried parallel eq a few years ago but i forgot about it. Thanks for remembering.

One of my favorite was to bring out detail in midrange is with a plugin called Lift 4 by Acoustica audio. It has a clipper that works on just the mid range. It does a bunch of other great things... but that is my magic sauce mid range detail lift!

Two tips in one! Great idea for the mid range but secondly, use your imagination and create your own tips. Way to go Bob!

Awesome, like a clean boost! Tnx

Excellent video and advice and in the real world reality of 75% of the people hearing your mix are using an I-phone or ear buds makes this advice even more valuable. thanks Bobby!

Awesome trick! Thank you for sharing🙌🏽🙏🏽. I like to create an effects bus (midrange sauce) in which I put the free saturation knob plug-in from Softtube, followed by an EQ with high cut and low cut filters applied. I have a music, vox, drum, bass, hook, and Fx buss set up that feeds a submaster bus for gain staging. Send the midrange sauces from your desired target bus (music, vocals, etc) and blend to taste.🤌🏽

I actually used to do this when I first started mixing .

Cool idea. I like the dynamic EQ so that it hits and gets out of the way. May try that on my overall mix || bus. And agreed that it’s important to experiment and explore one’s own techniques and not just copy. Thanks!

❤your tips!!

Aways excellent!!

this is an amazing trick def gona do it.

yes my friend, i call it my ns10 aux. streaky showed us on his channel. all goes to a submix aux that goes to another aux that holds a compressor that goes to my master. i can control the amount of compression on that aux b4 the master by pushing the submix up a bit. on the submix aux i 'send' a bit of it to another aux i call ns10, which also goes to the compressor aux then onto the master. it really does a great mid push. a little goes a long way to amateurs like mice elf.

Thanks Doc 😀

I love it!

I’ve been doing this with EQ for about 6 months, but I haven’t messed with doing it dynamically. Cool! I’ll have to try that.

I can already hear Gearspace people say RIP Phase Coherency.

Hey Bobby...greets from Sydney! great vid and you come across with great concepts: if I can be friendly honest 1. Use phase linear on any of these, in xover it is lossless anyway with no pre ring (also use free izotope eq) 2. Use as band pass else you are just boosting the neutral range (ie just louder) 3. 1st eq is redundant ie 1+1*0.75 is the same as 2*0.75 3. You can just the use a smooth comp to add extra mid punch eg 6ms attack to create the fill 4. Luv that you are on cubase, there are a lot of tools to organise that might help, esp channel visibility and colouring ;) All the best :)

great trick. CLA does a midrange para with guitars a lot (with return stereo G SSL eq), which just seems to work. Also similar to Andrew Scheps's rear bus method using 1176 pushed (which adds less dynamic midrange flavor on instrumentals). Nice when you come up with similar methods on your own. Thanks for sharing.

I use the Andrew Shepps Rear Bus technique a lot. I'm going to give this a go looks promising, Thank you.

Fantastic 🎉

I tooo have experimented with something similar. I will buss out elements of the song like drums, rthm gtrs, acust, bass...import the new 2 track and roll of heavy on both ends. Add some mid enhancing eq moves. Add to taste...I have tried it this way (sends in the box) but the 2 track was the way I learned it in the analog days...(i am 52) I have done this on a Tascam 424. Bounced it out. Used a home stereo cassette player and a mixing board, to record it back on a track next to the other 3 tracks in the 424 project...lol Yeah 4 tracks people. Adat was a God send. In 2001, I used the windows 98 office recorder to do a "voice recording" that was meant to be added to a Power Point or Word file for a presentation. I recorded a 5 sec guitar part. I got an email account and a friend of mine and I shared our first digital recording over a 512 kflex modem system. I had a Whoppin' 512 kb RAM at the time. We had to monitor and keep the computer and modem connection going because you would loose connectivity a lot in those days. There were no videos out like we have today. Period. Especially in the 80's when I was a young guy trying to learn and implement this stuff. Lots of tricks from the analog came with me to the box, and some just don't work. I've been from ALL analog, to a hybrid system that was self created. To all in the box minus a few outboard toys these days. Love the videos Doc!

I've seen this being done by others. Not the same exact tools, but similar concept....frequency-exagerated parallel compression. Some just on the music. Andrew Scheps does this JUST on the vocal. I've seen some do it on 3 frequency bands, using different compressors. Great trick.

Great tip, thanks! I'm a bit unclear about what's being sent to the "mid bus" - is it everything (which is then EQ-ed) or only mid-range sources? Can you explain this? Cheers!

I use the relay plugin to do the same thing. Except i put relay on the beat, it will un mask the vocals an u can put a dynamic eq on it. Makes the vocals sit them in place

Hey Bobby, great video thx man. QUESTION: why didn't you just make the first EQ dynamic? Why did you feel you had to make a duplicate dynamic? Trying to understand your thought process on this. Thx!

Definitely your idea with the dynamic eq, not too dissimilar though from Andrew Schepp’s Rear Bus, although he usually includes vocals, and it’s often about lifting the whole mid range as well as sometimes expanding the stereo width. Could be combined with his technique too

Dr. Bob, love your videos and have implemented MANY of your tips and tricks. On this one (and I am a cubase user as well) I can't figure out what is being routed to your "Mid" bus. I see the tracks being routed to the "track" channel which then goes to the stereo out. Are you adding an effects channel to the "Track" channel? If not, how is the "Mids" channel receiving signal? Thanks!

Cool trick. What do you think about making those EQ's on the Mid Bus band-pass, so when you bring that channel up it's ONLY bringing up those mid frequencies you're targeting?

✌🏼

Really cool video, thanks! Actually, I didn't get it fully. You sent your instrumental mix to this aux, after limiter and all?

Thanks Bobby! Hey that black acoustic treatment in your studio looks so cool! Like you're mixing in the Batcave, lol. Are those diffusers, or do they (also) absorb? Can't see if it's foam...

I'm a little confused too.. probably because I'm used to Logic Pro X and I know where to look to see the routings.. but I think I've got the gist of what you're doing.. let me know if I've got it right : all your instrument busses have their outputs set to a separate bus.. I'll call this the instruments sub-bus.. that sub-bus has it's output set to the stereo bus so it's essentially transparent.. but on that instruments sub-bus you've got a send going to another bus: I'll call the mid-focused EQ bus.. this is where your special purpose EQ lives and this bus output is set to the stereo bus.. so now you can mix in the amount of the mid-focused EQ you want to reach the stereo bus by using the bus fader to taste.. pretty ingenious Bobby.

This isn’t much different than using parallel compression on a bus. A lot of the big names I’ve seen do this choose colorful compressors with a signature midrange flavor that they push into the whole mix. Often times band limiting the parallel compression.. so it’s getting close. No wrong way to get there if it feels good in the track 🤘

Very cool did you ever try filtering everything out except for the mid range boosting on that bus?

So if you dont have fabfilter could you just use a stock eq and put a compressor or limiter on it to get the same effect?

I wanna know more about your acoustic wall diffusers please !

Why is JJP used in the screen cap ? This is YOUR trick, right ? Please explain. Thanks.

Hard to tell the difference with these Dollar General $10 dollar headphones. (I go through plenty due to long hair/sleep) I will try to remember to use more busses one day. I am using a phone / cheap headphones/ aux cord in Dodge Nitro connected to phone to do everything ATM. Am hugely interested in your cpu and settings . Power conditioner??? Thanks

Rock guitar MUST have mid range or it will sound like mud. I've never understood guitar players, in rock or metal, who scoop their mids. That's insane. Plus, mids give you that articulation without the shrill.

But you have a Track bus that's only the instrumental track, right? Why not just put these EQs on that sub ?

This seems like more of a mastering tip. Still good knowledge. The more you learn about audio the more the line blurs between mixing and mastering.

Pro Q is in linear phase mode?

Is the song meant for commercial release?

The radio? What's that?

I rode the mid bus in school

Do you dye your hair now?

Love your content, I really do but honestly it’s sounds like you think the Lord Alge brother’s invented modern mixing but they did not. People like Sir George Martin put bands like the Beatles on the map with mixes that sound way ahead of their time. I know the Alge brother didn’t not have YT tutorials to steal stuff from but I’m sure they listened to a lot of the old stuff to develop their style of mixing.

btw, on the ns10 aux i low and high pass all under 400 and over 4000. sorry, forgot about that.