In this Mix Walkthrough Video from Waves Michael Adams spends an hour with CLA taking a detailed look at one of his mixes which doesn’t use his SSL console and outboard hardware, instead he works entirely in the box. Here is the video with some of the most interesting points highlighted so you can find them quickly.

CLA is well known for hard hitting rock mixes with lots of aggression and impact. He mixes on a large format SSL console and makes extensive use of analogue outboard, particularly his 1176 compressors. However, while this gear is important if you watch the video you’ll see that ultimately his mixes are about a simple and direct approach. How does he do it?

8.00 - A Wall Of Guitars

Don’t be afraid to push the low end on guitars, and use an LA3A for tone, to take the harshness out of the guitars. Keep going until the guitars take over the drums in the compressor

“First of all, you start with a decent guitar sound. Now these are Phil X guitars. He's a great guitar player. These are all done in his house. So sometimes they're a little bit thin, so don't be shy with EQ. I find that most people make guitars… They don't put any girth any weight to them.”

11.10 - Stereo Placement of Tracks

Place guitars left, right, left, right. Leave the centre for vocals, bass and kick and snare. Don’t worry about matching drum close mics with their position in the overheads.

“They're all LCR. Why is your high hat so far left? But remember the high hat is just a direct mic in the big picture. So when you start to poke it up out of the left corner, it just comes out there a little bit over the top of the big stereo image. So I would really start to just focus on LCR.”

There are exceptions to this LCR approach, particularly percussion.

“if you put a Tambo hard left or a shaker hard right, it's really obvious. So you may manoeuvre it in between the clock somewhere.”

13.20 - Session Organisation

Find the doubles and “partner tracks” of mono tracks and turn everything which can be stereo into stereo tracks. Keep track names short, 3 letters or fewer if possible so they don’t get truncated in Narrow Mix View in Pro Tools, and keep tracks in the same order in sessions with the same colour coding from session to session.

“I make it the simplest name possible. When I get guitars and they're all mono tracks I find the partners, I find the double, I find it and I make stereo tracks out of all of it. I really prefer to have all stereo tracks except the mono ones, which are vocal, kick, snare bass. The main reason is once I balance that stereo pair and make it a stereo track then it's one EQ to worry about”

18.40 - Vocal Processing

CLA normalises his vocals to 0dB. Using the Gain AudioSuite plugin you can quickly analyse a clip to find out what its peak level is and if he’s bouncing source tracks down to a stereo pair he reduces the peak level by -3 dB per track being combined. He runs this normalised vocal into a ‘76 compressor with the same settings every time, with a moderate attack and a fast release and then into a limiter to catch peaks.

“I like to normalize all my vocals. If I'm combining a bunch I'll gain 'em down three dB or six or nine… This feeds the compressor, which is always [input] 30, [output] 18 [attack] 3 and [Release] 7. And then the afterburner [L1 Limiter], which takes the takes some of the tree tops off, some of the big problems I have with vocals. They'll be some branches sticking out that really bite. So this will hold that back in the mix.”

22.58 - It Doesn’t Matter What Things Sound Like In Solo

Very true and very important.

“No one hears anything in solo. Okay… Ever. So what does it matter if it sounds like it's blowing up or too compressed or whatever, if it works in this song, it works”

23.06 - How To Use A Lot Of Compression On Drums

The drums and cymbals are played in separate passes, allowing very aggressive compression on the room mics because there are no cymbals on the drums-only pass. If your drummer can perform that way then great but if you are using a drum VI this is really easy to try.

26.25 - How Do You Stop Reverb On Drums From Sounding Muddy?

In this mix CLA uses reverb sends only on his drum samples and his drums-only room track so the close mics and the cymbals are dry.

29.29 - How To Get Vocals And Guitars To Cut Through Without Competing With Each Other

Because CLA pans his guitars hard left and right and leaves his vocals central they leave space for each other. Then by making sure the midrange of the vocals are front and centre but the guitars focus more on  the top and the bottom end, they leave room for each other spectrally too.

“The real science is when you compress the vocals into the same dynamic range as a guitar, they coexist a lot better. If the vocals are too dynamic, you're never going to hear them over the guitars. It's like wearing a sharkfin and swimming in the ocean. The guitar is the ocean and the sharkfin is the vocal just peeking out over it. If the vocal is too dynamic, you won't be able to breathe because you're not gonna be above water. So you make that dynamic small”

37.30 - Does The Sound Of CLA Mixes Come From 2 Bus Processing?

CLA mixes into his bus processing from the beginning, he uses a combination of the CLA Mixdown plugin and the Abbey Road TG Mastering Chain but perhaps surprisingly he doesn’t use a limiter on his 2 bus.

“So I just keep it simple. I don't have this big cocktail of plugins, and I don't really use a limiter. Now you can put an L1 after this or an L3 or any of the '“L’s” but then just be careful about what happens to your drums at that point. My mix bus is pretty simple.”

51.15 - One Piece Of Advice From CLA

One piece of advice from CLA to aspiring mixers would be to organise and clean up your session before you start mixing. CLA is well known for mixing fast but perhaps the reason he can mix fast is because the sessions are ready to work on before he begins.

“Organize your session, clean up the session. Don't even start mixing ‘til it looks like this. It's simple”

If you watch the whole of this video you’ll find that theres a reason CLA is as successful as he is. And a lot of it is being direct and simplifying your process.