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Using Plugin Processors
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| My list of issues: | Issues Novices Typically Face |
| Excessive bass at
times, some inconsistency Not as smooth as commercial Mixes, especially in the mid range Not as punchy as commercial music Inconsistent imaging between different songs and sometimes in the same song Doesn't sound as good in the car as it does on studio monitors Vocals not as clear or sweet Mid range is harsher, more grainy Image is neither as wide or as 3 dimensional as some commercial mixes
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Not as loud as commercial
tracks even though it was compressed Track is noisy, harsh, hurts ears at high volumes Weak Bass, weak kick, disappearing kick, or it's too boomy and it drowns the rest out. Drums can't drive the track unless they are too loud One dimensional, flat sound, even though instruments were panned Everything runs together into a mushy, indistinct, sound Unintelligible, buried vocals Sounds "way different" on the car, boomy bass, no presence, muffled Balance between channels if off and it changes throughout the song |
The reason why I made you do this little exercise was to give you a sense
of what corrective actions you might take to get your tracks up to commercial speed. The correct use of audio plugins provides for solutions, at least partially, to all of the issues above. Naturally, if your other recording gear is not up to speed, or if your tracks were not recorded well in the first place you will have some trouble. The best plugins in the world will not fix a harsh sounding digital/analog converter (though they will still dramatically improve the output). And of course, bad material, off key vocals and poor performance is a show-stopper no matter what you do. Don't think just because a pro studio has great gear that they don't have to deal with the same problems we've listed above.
They do! The difference is they have tools to fix
them and know how to fix them. Every studio deals with off key vocals,
60hz hum, trouble getting the snare to sit right, getting the bass so it
sounds good on a boom box as well as a high end audiophile system. You
might be surprised to discover (given you have decent mics and preamps and a
nice audio interface) that their source material is not that much better
than yours. They just know what and when to tweak, and when not to
tweak. Lets cover the basics for the Newbies.
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The audio goes "through" the plugin depends on where they are placed in your mixer. There are basically 3 types of plugins. 1. Track based 2. Bus based. 3. Mix based
A Track based plugin is an insert that affects only that track. The plugin goes on the audio channel itself, so all audio leaving that channel is effected. Plugins that should be used on every track individually are compressors (and on tracks that must be as loud as possible, a limiter). If necessary, you may want to add a noise gate, EQ, and delay, chorusing or flanging to a track. Vocal tracks may benefit from exciters, de-essers and tuning plugins. Guitars should have their processing at the track level.
A Bus based plugin is one that you want to apply to more than one track, but not the entire mix. These use the sends on your virtual mixer. You create a bus and use the send on each channel to route audio to it. The typical plugins for busses are reverbs. You may need more than one. Having different tracks go through the same reverb is tried and true studio technique to give the impression the performers are actually playing in the same room. It's also critical for setting the front/back depth perspective of your soundstage. For creative tweaking, there's no end to the things you can do with sends and returns in the virtual environment of the sequencer. But as you get started, just use standard reverb and delay as your bus based plugins.
A Mastering plugin goes as an insert to your master out--its the last step in the chain before the final print and all of the audio goes through it. These plugins are the ones that are most critical to the "overall sound" of the final product. And it is here where we can solve many of the problems listed in our above exercise.
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Plugin formats. There are several plugin formats which include VST, DirectX, Core Audio, RTAS, TDM, AudioSuite, and MAS. . First, you should note which format plugins your sequencer supports. Cubase, for example, supports VST plugins. Cakewalk and Sonar rely on Direct X. Logic PC supports both VST and Direct X. Logic Mac only supports Audio Units. Digital Performer supports MAS. RTAS, TDM and Audiosuite are formats used by various digidesign products. Sometimes you can, with the addition of a "wrapper" plugin, use other formats in your sequencer. For example, with a VST to DX wrapper you can use VST plugins in Sonar.
A cool thing about plugins is that they work in all compatible audio applications you have on your system. For example, if you get a quality DX plugin for Sonar, you can also use it in ACID, SoundForge, Vegas. You can use the VST plugins that come with Cubase in other VST applications like Wavelab and even in Logic PC. You simply copy the plugin folder called "VstPlugins" from your Cubase directory to your Logic directory. Yet regardless of the format of the plugin, they are all used in the same ways, on tracks, busses, and master outs.
Free plugins Free plugins should be used with caution. They may crash your sequencer or make it unstable. I personally will not use them. It's just not worth it to add a questionable device to an application that has to work in real time.
The best plugins The best plugins are not cheap. They don't sound cheap either. One secret the people in large expensive studios have over you is they too use plugins, sometimes the same ones you already have in your sequencer. Yet you will also find the top plugins in their arsenal. The quality of a high end plugin can indeed match the quality of its hardware counterpart.
There are two major plugin bundle makers. Universal Audio and Waves. Both a famous in the studio world and make a complete set of plugin audio processors that would take a roomful of expensive gear. There is a disadvantage to buying bundles. Sometimes you buy plugins you will never use, because they come in the bundle. Both companies let you buy smaller bundles then upgrade your set by adding individual plugins later, but this method quickly becomes more expensive. I have both the Waves Platinum Bundle and the equivalent of the UAD Ultra Pak with a few extras added in. I used the Waves bundle when making my sample cd roms and they were extremely helpful tweaking my samples in Sound Forge. I have the UAD bundle installed on my Mac and I use them in every production, even though I have all the Logic plugins and many Native Instruments processors also in my Mac's arsenal. Overkill? Yes. You don't need as many as I have.
Universal Audio is a name that goes way back into audio history. Two legendary products are UREI/Universal Audio 1176 Compressor Limiter and the revered LA-2A Leveling Amplifier. The sons of the late Bill Putman, who designed the 1176 and LA-2a, have rekindled the company. You can read more about the story. Working from their father's original schematics, they built a hardware re-issue of these classic compressors and then took it one step further. The UAD-1 plugins require a hardware card that fits in your computer. These come in PCI, PCIe formats. Make sure you get the right one!
Some of Universal audio's plugins are
computer models of actual hardware audio processors.
That is what makes them so valued. Many people say
they have a hard time telling the difference between the
plugin and the actual hardware. Units like the
Pultec EQ, Fairchild, Roland Space Echo actually exist
in the real world.
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Universal Audio UAD1 Ultra Pak DSP Card (Macintosh and Windows)
Universal Audio UAD-Xpander Xpert Laptop DSP System (Macintosh and
Windows)
Universal Audio UAD1e PCIe Expert Pak DSP Card (Macintosh and Windows)
Be careful to buy the right UAD pak for your computer. For example, the Mac Pro has to use a set with a PCIe card; most PCs can use a PCI card. |
Some of my favorite UAD1 plugins:
Pultec
Fairchild
Precision Limiter
Precision EQ
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Waves Native Platinum Bundle (Macintosh and Windows)
Waves
Musicians II Native Plug-In Bundle (Macintosh and Windows)
Waves Vocal Bundle Plug-Ins
Waves Native Restoration Bundle (Macintosh and Windows) |
Some of my favorite Waves Plugins: L2 Ultra Maximizer
Linear Phase multiband
Renaissance Channel and L3 Ultrmaximizer |
There are probably more studios relying on the Waves L1 Ultra Maximizer and C4 Multiband than they care to admit. The difference these can make on ones music is outstanding. Want to hear the difference it can make? Download the demo from Waves. It's fully functional for 14 days so you can actually use it to master some songs courtesy of Waves. If you are like me, the question might not be if you can afford it, it might be can you afford not to have it
It took me a long time to warm up to the Waves products for a couple of reasons. They are expensive, and every time I'd look at the back of the box I'd see plugins I already had. Lessee, I have my multiband compressor, my reverb, my gate, my multi-tap :) After all, it all sounds the same, Right? Wrong! It took me less than 10 seconds of running my audio through a TrueVerb, a Renaissance EQ or a Ultra Maximizer to become a total evangelical convert. Your talking to a guy who has all the sonic foundry plugins, all the Logic plugins, and many of the Cakewalk and Steinberg plugs. What sets the waves plugins apart from the rest is not only it's stunning graphics and outstanding ease of use, but their unbelievable audio quality. The audio comes out of the oven warm, supple and professionally smooth. You really have to hear it.
| Free Plugins | |
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My mixes are louder, clearer, with better bass, better transients. I've spent nearly a week just getting acquainted, bouncing old songs from DAT into the computer and then processing them. In about two minutes I can get dramatic improvements, just by chaining the 10 band parametric, if needed the Renaissance Bass, the C4 multiband, sometimes the stereo imager, and finally the L1 Ultra Maximizer. If you had a good mix to begin with, you'll find it easy to make it outstanding. Even if you had a just an old recording from cassette, you'll be surprised to find dynamics and nuances that were deeply buried in the original. The 10 band is so precise you can cut away damaged frequencies surgically, something that my hardware 31 band is supposed to do, but can't, not like this! The L1 Ultramaximer works so well with Logic that the peak meters match exactly. That is, if the L1 says it will limit at -.01 db that's exactly where Logic's meter pegs, ditto for bouncing to DAT. The result is increased resolution you can hear. Better tracking, better bouncing and a better mixdown.
Each plugin comes with a .pdf and paper manual so you can learn how the experts use these. I'm also getting awesome results editing samples in SoundForge with them, discovering new ways to polish sounds that eclipses differences between my studio and the big studios downtown. One cool thing is the 10 band parametric. Not only can you EQ your sample exactly the way you like, you can create a different EQ for the left and right side, and level each side so they peak exactly at 0db. And you can give your samples as much high end as you want, and surprisingly, the results are not harsh or strident. This allows one to make the perfect sample. It's good magic.
iZotope's Ozone Mastering SystemA less expensive, yet complete software mastering system is iZotope's Ozone. Ozone comes in the form of a direct x plugin. But it's much more than a single plugin, it's like getting an entire mastering suite in one single interface. You get a paragraghic equalizer which has an excellent real time spectrum analyzer; a mastering reverb; multiband compressor; multiband harmonic exciter; multiband stereo imager and finally, a loudness maximizer.
You can chain these up however you like. The bands are moveable, just like on the expensive hardware multibands. One advantage of having all these in one plugin is you can bypass all these functions at once, or quickly bypass only certain ones. This saves time (and wear and tear on your ears) and lets you make the instant comparisons you need to do when mastering. You'll have a hard time finding plugins that can do multiband imaging and exciting anywhere (you won't find them in the Waves set, for example) and the way these work in concert with the multiband compressors is awesome. One cool thing I was able to do with the imager was to widen the midrange yet leave the bass alone where it was distinct, front and center--try that with your garden variety stereo imager. Also the mastering reverb is truly a godsend, just a little touch goes a long way. I like how you can easily set it to a narrow bandwidth so you get depth exactly where you want it and not where you don't want it. The Loudness Maximizer gives predictable results every time. It has a "brickwall" limiter much like the Waves L1 that lets you jam audio into every nook and cranny of the audio bandwidth if you desire. There's also a "soft limiting" option that is perfect for when you want to exploit the full dynamic range of the audio bandwidth, with quiet sections as well as loud bombasts.
I've tried Ozone with Logic 5 (PC) as well as Logic 7 (Mac) and Vegas with excellent, glitch-free results. I also found the spectrum display to be great at helping isolate system noise coming into my audio interface--stuff you can't hear unless you crank the gain. Mastering is an art that takes practice, but with Ozone, it's easy to get experience under your belt fast. Check it out for yourself and
download the demo. Tweak gives Ozone two strong thumbs up. Get
more info on Ozone.
PSP Audio's
Vintage Warmer
Another processing Plugin that can make dramatic improvement to your mixes is the PSP Vintage Warmer. The plugin operates like a vintage compressor that optimizes the bass and treble range of your music. It also is able to give a very authentic emulation of tape saturation. As you see from the pic, it has some nice looking (and accurate) Vu meters. I was able to dramatically improve any mix I threw at it, giving it stronger bass and shiny vocals, a warm sounding top end. The sound is reminiscent of super quality analog recordings to reel to reel or vinyl. While it's very subjective, I found I could achieve results where the audio totally locked in a beautiful organic whole with a wonderful sheen. You can only get the Vintage Warmer from their site and there is a demo you can download and try. I have used it with Logic, Cubase, Sonar, Sound Forge and Vegas 3 with no problems. DX and VST version included. PSP Audio
Hardware supported plugins require the hardware be present to run. They also take strain off the CPU by doing the processing in hardware, hence there is less of a drain on the computer for processing audio in real time. Also the hardware prevents piracy, so the developer is able to get a return for their efforts.
TC Electronic PowerCore.
Powercore is a hardware-supported set of plugins that can be used in VST and Audio Unit compatible applications, like Cubase and Logic. There is also a new product called the
PowerCore Compact. Both are firewire devices that you can plug into desktops or laptops. You are provided with a core group of plugins and can add more as the need arises. Some of the available options are quite high end, such as the Sony Oxford series, and the
Access Virus Soft Synth
Cleansers? Yep. Audio can get dirty. Hum from unbalanced lines, ambient noise picked up from mics, hiss from old tapes, scratches on vinyl, and clicks and pops, radio frequency interference from poorly configured soundcards can all conspire to ruin your beautiful sounding tracks. Naturally, the real solution is never to incur these maladies in the first place, but often we don't have that option when we are working for clients, or when grandma wants your second cousin's 4th grade acapella cleaned up. As usual you can pay a little or pay a lot for restoration software, and there is no guarantee they will be able to fix everything. But they will help.
Bias makes a PC/Mac entry level plugin called Sound Soap. I have that one, and it is good if used in moderation. Bias also makes a full-scale version called SoundSoap pro.
Leave it to Waves to chart the high end here with the Waves Native Restoration Bundle.
For those who work on Sound Forge you might want to check out their Noise Reduction 2 plugin.
One of the more recent entries into the Plugin Scene are convolutuon reverbs. This differ from typical reverb plugins as they use mathematical models of characteristics of different spaces to create their effect. The result is a much more realistic reverberant output that can exceed the quality one can achieve in the best hardware reverb boxes. The drawback to convolution reverbs is the immense hit on the CPU. Even today's fastest computers can't do too many of these in real time.
One of the first was Sony's Acoustic Mirror, which is now bundled in Sound Forge. Emagic then launched Space Designer and eventually bundled it into Apple's Logic. Waves released the IR1 Convolution reverb and recently the IRL Convolution Reverb ("L" is for "light")
For Pro Tools HD (not for you digi 001 and 002 users) Sony has released the
Oxford Reverb. I believe this is the most expensive single plugin on the market. Go ahead and peek at the price. Not a convolution, but a traditional reverb with lots of control.
Antares
makes a formidable line of track based plugins which include Antares
Auto-Tune, Microphone modeler and
Filter. Auto Tune is perhaps the most famous. It is designed to work on vocal tracks, correcting the pitch in reference to user selectable scales. They now have an audio units version (v4). My favorite is the Filter. Check out my
review.
They also have a bundle called the
Avox Vocal Toolkit with the THROAT physical modeler,
the DUO auto doubler, the CHOIR vocal multiplier and
more.
Wrapping Up (sic) for now.. Of course there's tons of other plugins available. I don't have them all, so there is no way this can be considered a comprehensive review. This article just touches on one that I know and like. The point is that plugins can dramatically alter your sound for the better and if you haven't explored this aspect of your digital audio sequencer you are truly missing out. The Holy Grail of Audio is not as far from your studio as you might think. With quality plugins like Waves, you can jump to the top of the class and deliver some outstanding audio.
Best of Luck in your studio enterprise,
Cool Link:
Digidesign's Plugin Finder
Apple's Audio Unit Compatibility List (for LogicPro)
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Cool Quote: Genius is present in every age, but the men carrying it within them remain benumbed unless extraordinary events occur to heat up and melt the mass so that it flows forth. Diderot (1713 - 1784)
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TweakHeadz Lab
Studio-Central
Audio-Pro-Central |
What is a plugin? A plugin is a small computer program which fits into the virtual mixer in your sequencer. Plugins typically model themselves after hardware rack units used in professional studios. For example there are plugins for effects boxes, such as reverbs and delays, effects pedals, like guitar distortion, flange and chorus, and for mixing and mastering processors such as compressors, limiters, exciters, sub bass enhancers, stereo imagers and many more. In the virtual studio of the sequencer, the plugin effectively replaces these hardware boxes with their software equivalents.
Important
Tip: 
