Audio Legends Chris Lord Alge Mixing Course

Audio Legends Chris Lord Alge Mixing Course [DVD Tutorial]

Audio Legends Chris Lord Alge Course 1 Review

Steven Slate recently launched a new audio educational program called Audio Legends, featuring the music industry’s most notable mixing engineers showing how they mix a song (with Slate plugins).

Course 1 features Grammy award-winning mixing engineer Chris Lord Alge mixing a song called “Our Time” by Screaming at Demons, which was recorded at NRG Studio B with Chad Smith on drum duty.

The course has two components:

1. Seven videos, clocking in at an hour of view time, with Chris Lord Alge discussing his mix preparation and mix bus techniques, mixing drums, bass, electric guitars, vocals, effects and his automation approach.
2. The finished session and audio files that Chris Lord Alge mixed, including all of his mix automation and Slate plugins settings. The session is available on multiple platforms like ProTools, Digital Performer, Logic and Cubase.

The best part about this type of educational material is that you can open up the mix session in your own studio and hear it through an environment that your ears are tuned to, which can give you a better understanding of what the mixer is hearing.

Audio Legends Course 1 Videos

I like how the video series gets right to the point with Chris Lord Alge discussing how and why he made certain mix decisions for each instrument.

Chris Lord Alge is known for big, wide-sounding rock mixes, and after hearing him speak on these videos, you can tell that his BIG personality is well-represented in his mixing.

Some of the most surprising things that stood out to me were:

1. He makes LARGE, broad EQ moves on the top and low end.
2. He didn’t compress as much as I thought he would, and his use of the VCC console plugin and VTM tape plugin to soak up transients first was really interesting.
3. Overall the amount of plugins used was on the short list.
4. No drum bus!

Some things that Chris Lord Alge did that I really liked:

1. His effects processing, especially for vocals.
2. How he EQ’s drum overheads.
3. His tip on checking drum phase by boosting low end temporarily.
4. His use of the tape plugin for different instruments.

After watching all of the videos, it’s easy to understand why his mixes sound so wide without the use of stereo widening plugins. It’s a nice lesson in not being afraid to go extreme for extreme results.

Who Will Benefit from the Audio Legends Courses?

For beginners, I think the most important thing about this course is just seeing how someone else organizes and prepares a mix for optimal workflow, including bussing tracks to effects and parallel processing.

That alone will put a beginner a couple years ahead. I wish there was something like this when I first started out!

As a word of caution, though, I feel like an aggressive approach like this on tracks recorded in a bedroom or for a genre other than pop and rock will be dangerous, but overall, it’s a great way to see and hear how a professional mixing engineer like Chris Lord Alge approaches a mix.

More advanced mix engineers will discover at least one thing that they like and can add to their mixing “tool box” for future reference. Plus, it’s fun and gets the creative juices flowing!