The latter has the Valhalla Room for some extra ambience. “I split the acoustic guitars over two tracks, because the intro and middle eight guitars needed very different treatments. Real ‘Bollywood’-style strings were given a synthetic quality using Valhalla’s VintageVerb, SoundToys’ Little AlterBoy and CableGuys’ ShaperBox.The increased track count at the mix came about partly because single parts were split across multiple tracks to receive different processing. But with the MDW you literally hit one of the five buttons, and it automatically does everything for you to allow you to find that frequency.”
The general technique to identify a frequency you want to notch out is to narrow the Q down to a minimum, boost the gain to maximum, and sweep along the frequencies until you find the one that bothers you. It sounds very musical and natural to me, and it’s very quick to use. It is an imitation of the Massenburg 8200 EQ, which I have two of in my rack. “The Massenburg EQ is my favourite in-the-box EQ. Perhaps Mark Ralph’s most-used plug-in is the Massenburg Design Works equaliser.
BOLLYWOOD SAMPLE CHOPS PLUS
There also are very few sends in the session, and only Demi Lovato’s lead vocal tracks have sends to the three aux effect tracks: reverbs from Audio Ease’s Altiverb and Valhalla DSP’s Valhalla Room, plus delay from SoundToys’ Echoboy. Ralph’s emphasis on working ‘out of the box’ means only a few tracks have extensive plug-in processing: mainly, the bass, Bollywood strings and lead vocal tracks.
BOLLYWOOD SAMPLE CHOPS PRO
To give you an overview, this Pro Tools screen shows the entire mix session for ‘Solo’. In the case of ‘Solo’ the Pro Tools mix session ballooned to 80 tracks, consisting of 13 tracks of drums (red), two tracks of bass (light blue), two tracks of guitar (light purple), eight tracks of synths and instrument samples (green and purple), six tracks of Bollywood strings (dark purple), 14 tracks of strings (dark blue), three strings group tracks, including one string reverb record track, eight tracks of vocal chops (green), 10 tracks of Demi Lovato lead vocals, including two lead vocal group tracks, two backing vocal tracks (pink), three auxiliary effect tracks (purple), the aforementioned four group tracks that go to the desk (drums, bass, instruments, vocals, in light blue) and a mix print track. The hardware stage of his mixing process, as described above, ended with Fuller exporting the analogue mix to Pro Tools.
The mix of ‘Solo’ is credited to Ralph, Clean Bandit’s Grace Chatto and Jack Patterson, with an engineering credit for Ralph’s engineer Tom AD Fuller.