And although Hawkins is primarily known for mixing more alternative music, he also has a track record mixing commercial rap. The dramatic shift to punk pop is largely explained by the involvement of Blink‑182 drummer Travis Barker, who co‑wrote and co‑produced the album. Tickets To My Downfall is the Kelly’s fifth studio album, and the punk‑pop‑with‑hip‑hop‑undertones approach helped make it his most successful album to date, going to number one in the US and number three in the UK. ‘Concert for Aliens’ was released as the second single. The only exceptions are the album’s lead single, ‘Bloody Valentine,’ mixed by Avron, and the third single, ‘My Ex’s Best Friend,’ mixed by Ghenea. Hawkins ended up mixing most of Machine Gun Kelly’s latest album, Tickets To My Downfall. They obviously loved what I did on that song, because I got the gig!” The track felt a bit like 1995, but it was important to make it sound like it’s from today. If we like it, you can do the whole album.’ It was pop punk, but it also had a hip‑hop feel, which I purposely enhanced, because I felt that made it more unique.
They sent me the Pro Tools session of ‘Concert for Aliens’ and the rough mix, without any instructions, other than: ‘Here is a song to mix. “I’d just been working with Travis Barker on a number of projects,” explains Hawkins from his impromptu studio in his new home in Nashville, “so he recommended me for this one. So when Hawkins received a request last summer to mix a new track for Machine Gun Kelly, better known for his rap music, he must have raised an eyebrow. While Serban Ghenea and Manny Marroquin have long been the US’s go‑to mixers for pop, it seems that Neal Avron and Adam Hawkins are often top of the list when distorted electric guitars carry punk pop songs. Who better to mix it than punk/hip‑hop crossover engineer Adam Hawkins. Push the “S” on any module to hear it alone in the signal chain, and hit the “power” button to turn it off.When rapper Machine Gun Kelly enlisted the help of producer and Blink‑182 drummer Travis Barker on his latest album, a shift to pop‑punk seemed inevitable. You can load up to eight modules at once into VMR, but it’s still easy to solo or mute any of the processing modules you have loaded using the Solo and Power buttons. To A/B the signal chains against each other, just press the A or B button in real time to hear that signal chain in action. Once cloned, you can change some parameters on the alternate path, or even swap out entire modules. With VMR it’s easy to clone an entire signal chain for comparison – just press the right arrow and everything currently on path A is copied to path B. You can also drag to reorder the modules as well. You can easily see all of the processing modules installed in the Library Pane, and you just drag and drop to get them into the signal chain. You can change the vibe, color and sound of your mix with a single click and easily undo and redo your changes. VMR 2.0 comes with seven default Dream Strips, although you can remove them and make your own. Now you can instantly start mixing with the modules you use the most. So whenever VMR 2.0 is launched the leftmost Dream Strip always loads first. VMR 2.0 opens with your own custom dream channel strip by default.
VMR 2.0 ships with the Mix Bundle One, which contains four Slate Digital processing modules: FG-401 Compressor, FG-S EQ, FG-116 FET Compressor and FG-N EQ. But even beyond the sound you can get with VMR 2.0, you also get the added bonus of speed and efficiency from having your entire processing chain in one convenient window. Choose from dozens of modules including vintage modeled EQs, compressors, enhancers, filters, preamps, mixing consoles, and more.
VMR 2.0 allows audio engineers to easily create the channel strips of their dreams using a library full of analog modeled plugins.
Added a “Search Modules” feature in the Library.Introduced the Oversampling option (through Settings menu).Removed Noise from the following modules: FG-N, FG-S, FG-Stress, FG-73, FG-76.Dream Strips – 8 Instantly Recallable and Customizable Channel Strip Configurations Accessible with 1-Click.