Yeah I'm on a Mac, the download was a 450mb dmg file which installed both the VST and the demo library.
It needs to be hosted in a DAW btw, it isn't a standalone product if that's what you're looking for.
It added it to the right file (for me anyway) automatically when installingDo the contents install to the Library -> Audio -> Plug Ins?
How do I go about adding them to Ableton, for example?
It added it to the right file (for me anyway) automatically when installing
Anyone have a list of good free mac VST's?
edit: btw got the pamphlets my dad got me from NAMM on Bitwig, it sounds very impressive
cool thanksMichael Norris spectral plugins are amazing and free. I'd be using them if I wasn't on PC.
I've gone the last like 4 or 5 years but I live in SF nowThose are AU plugs only, no VST but that shouldn't be a problem depending on your DAW. What kind of plugs are you after tho? Synths? Creative effects? Mastering tools?
There's a mix of stuff here that might be useful:
http://www.resoundsound.com/25-best-free-vst-au-plugins-pc-mac-2013-part-1/
Off the top of my head my fave free VSTs are TAL Noisemaker and Tyrell N6 synths, bx cleansweep for HP/LP filter, Molot compressor for dirty Russian compression and Voxengo Span for visually monitoring frequencies.
And how come your dad went to NAMM and you didn't man? What's the story there?
I don't think I have Garageband. I'll look into those. I have Molot and Camelcrusher alreadyThose default AU's are probably from Garageband if you have that installed.
For what you need check out Freeverb for verb, Sonimus EQ for eq, Yohngs W1 limiter, Molot compressor and Camelcrusher for fun.
Also I need to learn compression in general
Compression took me ages to get properly (and I'm still a long way off from feeling like I've mastered it), even after I had read a stack of tutes and understood what was happening inside the compressor I still had trouble trying to dial in the right compression settings. It wasn't until I got a dedicated hardware compressor and spent long hours sitting in front of with my eyes closed just really listening hard to the changes being made when I turned the knobs. You don't need a hardware comp of course, but at the very least map Attack, release, ratio and threshold to a MIDI controller so you can change these settings with your eyes closed and your ears wide open.
A good place to start is really think about what you're trying to achieve by compressing. For example if you're just trying to make a snare pop out in the mix then do a really slow attack so all the start transients are preserved, a really quick release so the tail doesn't smear, a high ratio to emphasise the sharpness of the snare sound and the threshold generally needs to be set in relation to the volume of your snare, a low threshold is a good place to start for a snare example. You should see loads of gain being reduced when the compressor triggers.
Remember that the compression is also going to bring up any reverb or delay effects too so best to compress beforehand if possible, and the majority of compressors I use also naturally roll off a bit of bass and treble so don't be concerned if you feel the need to re-eq after comping.
Conversely, if you're looking to comp at the master then you want hardly any gain reduction at all, maybe a 1.something ratio, high threshold, gentle attack, gentle release, if you see your gain reduction meter bouncing a lot then you're probably working the comp too hard. Gentle is the key on the master.
Also, mixing back in a bit of the uncompressed sound can create some really big sounding parts ala parallel, NYC compression. And don't forget that compression ratios are multiplied. So if you do 2:1 ratio on a snare and then 2:1 on the drum bus that contains that snare and then another 2:1 at the master the snare is actually being compressed 2 x 2 x 2 which is an 8:1 ratio.
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I don't really have a genre at all yet, so if I do something hip hop I'll let you knowif any of you dudes are producing the "hip-hop" beats and need someone to rap over them send me a pm i like to rap for fun in my spare time
here is me rapping over other people's beats i stole[
yes pleaseIf you guys are really, really interested receiving help then perhaps I can make some video tutorials. I work exclusively in Pro Tools, but a lot of things are still applicable. Especially Abelton live.
The snare drum just like any idiophone or membranophone has an envelope where the peak is immediately present at the point of compression. Doing what you suggested does not help your mix at all. This only further complicates and confuses you on how much headroom you have to work with.
Also, the purpose of compression is NOT to preserve the transient. Applying a compressor to tracks in your mix is done to control the sounds that are too dynamic so that you can mix much more comfortably.
That is not a good compressor. I have seen it confuse people who were trying to learn.
can i get some feedback on a song i made over the past few days? i dont usually sing so im not used to mixing vocals really
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40086894/Cancer.mp3
Compression related:
i'm working on a track with heavy use of side-chain compression as rythmic effect (i use a synth with 0 Attack and 0 Release\full DS with the same pattern of the kick as a trigger).But a couple of instruments are wild and tend to go overboard (a sub-bass and a lead) because the melody is quite wide in the piano roll, so in certain notes they tend to prevail upon the rest of the mix (particularly the sub). I really don't want to change the instruments cause i like how they sound for the rest of the track, Should i use another compressor to help make them more "stable" in volumes? What if i set up another comp before or after the sidechain one?How will affect the track once i get to the mastering?
Should i just automate the volumes to be lowering those peak notes?
So many questions
Track is good, nice mood and good percussive stuff, but the vocals are feeling weird, too much reverb. Maybe try using a shorter decay (maybe a gate?) on the reverb, and eq the lower frequencies off from the tail of it. Give it a shot and let us hear how it goes
I'm in Reason 5, so no VST allowed,. However i gave a look to the link you provided and...Hopefully I've understood you right. If the sub bass is going overboard, one good way to combat this is to print the root note of your sub to audio, stretch it over the key range of what you need in a sampler, then re program in your sub bass line with the sampled instrument. This will ensure the note velocities remain the same.
Instead of automating the volume levels by hand for the lead you could try out an AutoGain plugin. You could demo this to see if it has the desired effect.
But there a number of ways you could go about correcting this, just try out a number of different things and see what works best for you.
Why would you do all of those routing on the vocals?just curious, i'm not criticizing you. I never really used vocals, in my last track i had some samples but i did nothing more than adding a couple of very short delays panned oppositely to give a little wideness and a gated reverb+delays on the mid-high frequencies, but the main sample were still clear and almost unaltered from the original.i did a lot of crazy routing on that, had a return track of reverb on top of the regular track, then like 2 chains of filtered delays on the regular vocal tracks, then had about 5 vocal tracks of me each with reverb on a bus for all of them, ill experiment around with it
Watched this, and if you would plese elaborate more on the difference between limiting and compressing, it'd an interesting lecture for me.@Fusebox
@Professor Chaos
I made this video to directly respond to you guys
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7U4Bf9ef6bk&feature=youtu.be
@Fusebox
@Professor Chaos
I made this video to directly respond to you guys
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7U4Bf9ef6bk&feature=youtu.be
Why would you do all of those routing on the vocals?just curious, i'm not criticizing you. I never really used vocals, in my last track i had some samples but i did nothing more than adding a couple of very short delays panned oppositely to give a little wideness and a gated reverb+delays on the mid-high frequencies, but the main sample were still clear and almost unaltered from the original.
Anyone have any recommendations on a pair of good Studio Monitors?
Watched this, and if you would plese elaborate more on the difference between limiting and compressing, it'd an interesting lecture for me.
A 20:1 ratio and above the compressor is considered to work as a limiter, though a theoretical limiter would have a compression ratio of infinity to one (whatever the input level, it would always be attenuated down to the threshold level, so that output would never exceed the threshold once the attack time has elapsed).
Limiters
For the compressor to work as a limiter, we will adjust the compression ratio to 20:1. Unlike compression, limiting is utilized as a brick wall that avoids signal peaks causing damage to speakers or overloading amplifiers (or recording devices), so limiters should only activate occasionally. Otherwise the effect will be very audible and sound quality will suffer. Attack times need to be fast to ovoid overload or over-excursion (on the speaker). Since there is always some degree of limiter overshoot (the limiter takes a finite time to provide full limiting, so some transient peaks may escape the limiting action), the threshold level may have to be set 2 or 3 dB lower than the level we do not want to exceed, so as to allow for some time for the limiter to be able to clamp the signal down.
Depending on the speed of a limiter's attack time, some limiters may distort the signal, working as abrupt wave form clippers. As mentioned earlier, some compressors are equipped with dedicated peak limiters. If so, we will make use of then as they are specifically designed for the job.
A dedicated type of limiter may be integrated into a power amplifier's channel to prevent continuous clip. If they are correctly designed, the compression (limiting) threshold is not fixed, and compression is only activated when the amplifier channel is actually clipping. The output voltage at which the amplifier clips may vary as a function of the type of signal and the mains power supply voltage, so the limiter would use a "floating" threshold to get the limiter to track the amplifier clip, avoiding unnecessary limiting when the amplifier is not clipping, or avoid the amplifier clipping when the mains voltage is lower than nominal AC power levels. In the case of the limiters in a crossover or controller, ideally they receive a "sense" signal from the amplifier to determine whether the amplifier for a given band is clipping or not, though the additional cabling makes it somewhat cumbersome for live sound applications (unless the sense capability is used in a powered-speaker). If it is the crossover unit that is taking care of the limiting, in practice we have a multiband compressor and, if compression attack and release times are user selectable, we will need to chose faster timer for the high frequencies and slower ones for the low frequencies, thus optimizing the compromise between protection and audibility.
Also i'm glad you pointed at the fact that you are not a fan of the louness war, i'm not as well (i love to rewatch here and there theBroken Age Teaser because of its dynamics), but as an EDM wanna be producer, i'm struggling to achieve that really loud-as-fuck sound for my productions, because that's how the genre works,and i think others in this thread may be in the same boat.Don't be too harsh on us
Professor Chaos said:Hey man, I appreciate your reply. I get what you're saying about using a compressor in a general sense. And I agree that you need to fundamentally know how a compressor works before you can use it effectively. And a lot of what we are saying here would not be applicable to mixing live drums, which you seem to be doing in the video.
Professor Chaos said:You're asking why you would want to compress the decay of the snare and leave the attack stage intact right? By doing this you increase the overall perceived volume of the snare. It's not about the decay cutting through the mix, as you say in the video. Then you go on to say that it is the impact that defines the snare drum. This is correct and precisely the reason why (In Fusebox's example) you would set a slow attack on the compressor to avoid clamping down on the attack of the snare.
Professor Chaos said:Re: the Loudness war. I don't want to go into it too much, because I'm certainly no advocate of loud tracks. But to get a track as loud as possible (like most EDM for example) it needs to be loud before it even goes to the mastering engineer. This will usually involve a combination of heavy compression and limiting on a ton of tracks. As an example, listen to a track by Noisia or Skrillex. Again, I'm not advocating their music, but to achieve results like theirs, compression and limiting is going on all over the place before it even reaches mastering.
I
Getting a track to be as loud as possible basically takes no skill at all, Professor Chaos. If you can open a plugin and turn 1 knob, it can be as loud as your heart's content.