Today, I’m going to dive in and show you a little bit of how I’m using iZotope Alloy 2 to save me a ton of time on mixing records. The preset library in iZotope Alloy 2 has really helped me to knock off quite a bit of time on fumbling with sounds and sound design type stuff. Their preset are great, and I’m going to show you how and why right now.

I’ve selected a couple of upright pianos I’ve got. This is a song chosen by Jeris Cole, it’s featured in the Mixing Vocals and mixingacoustic.com tutorials. I’m going to show you a little bit of how I quickly selected a couple of presets to help me keep moving forward in the mixing stages of this record.

This is after as they’re processed.

A bit of a volume difference there, but the breakdown of it looks something like this. Let’s take the organ.

I love this preset on organ. Listen to the A/B of that.

[organ]

You’ll see that this one’s got quite a bit to it. We’ve got an EQ removing, taking away the lows and boosting the junk out of the highs. The exciter is like an EQ. Check out how dead this thing sounds without the exciter.

[organ plays without exciter, then with exciter]

You can use the drive knob for the different settings.

The dynamics we’re just controlling a little bit. Knocking off some of the peaks, and then the limiter we’re just using for a last bit of gain staging and level. It doesn’t even look like anything’s happening, so I’ll have to bring that down a little.

[organ]

Hear that in the mix, we’ll pull the drums back in. Let’s bypass this organ, we’ll pull up the volume a little bit so we can hear that a little better.

[song]

Whenever I brought it back in, obviously it hit us in the face. It was too loud. But then I dropped the volume down, and by thinning it out, cleaning it up, dirtying it up a little bit in the mids and the highs, it allowed it to be okay lowering volume, and then now it accented the mids and the treble for those little licks for it to be still an underlying pad type feel, but the organs got the fingers moving a little bit, giving us some sweet fills in there, and we hear that better now.

We could even go up and see I automated it up at the B section of the chorus. Let’s hear that.

[song]

So it just dies on us. The clarity is pretty much non-existent before that preset. Something I like to do is reverse engineer these presets, let’s pull open something else, what’s another one… Probably the piano is a good example.

Let’s take a look somewhere in here on the piano.

[piano]

Before.

I think I converted that to “EZ keys” from ToonTrack. I don’t mind that piano sound, I actually kind of like it by itself. If I was doing an acoustic deal with a piano, acoustic guitar, and a vocal, I would more than likely not remove all those lows like I have to blend this in the mix, but let’s hear the iZotope preset that I’ve pulled open. I’ll go to the global here, and I’ve got “Poppy electric piano.”

[piano, before and after preset]

So, I use the multiband transient designer all the time. If you guys have been watching the channel, you know I’ve been using that on all things; drums, bass, all kinds of stuff for that. That’s in my opinion, well worth the price of admission. Izotope prices their things very well.

The exciter is probably my second reason to buy this plug-in. If you haven’t already purchased it, this thing is incredible. If you don’t own UAD and you don’t have the Studer or Slate’s tape machine or whatever it is, this might be what you’re looking for. Even if you do own those things, this kind of does something a little bit different than those. I like the mix knob; you can mix it to taste, you can drive the crap out of it, and blend it in parallel… All kinds of stuff you can do. You saw I was using it as an equalizer almost by driving those certain frequencies against the tracks, so presets by iZotope Alloy 2. Love what that’s doing. Not going to bog down your time too much on the preset stuff, but I felt like it was worth a video the good people over at iZotope deserved. A shout out for that.

So more coming your way soon. Mixingacoustic.com is the new course, mixingvocals.com has been there, got a great response from both of those. Thank you for all of the incredible support. Don’t forget to check out theproaudiofiles.com.