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[Viitalahde]

EDIT: I quoted instead of modifying.

[Twerk]

i love reading what you guys did. a question for you fabfilter folks...what's up with the limiter attack times? thousands of milliseconds?

FabFilter Pro-L has a "transient" stage called lookahead, and a "release" stage that uses attack and release controls. The long attack times apply to the latter. In this plug-in, the attack and release are working on overall dynamics.

[MoreSpaceEcho]

thanks for the explanations guys. my simple mind can understand running a mix through transformers, but that limiter thing sounds complicated! i suppose in practice it's easy to set up once you've got it sorted though.

[Twerk]

thanks for the explanations guys. my simple mind can understand running a mix through transformers, but that limiter thing sounds complicated! i suppose in practice it's easy to set up once you've got it sorted though.

It's not as complicated as it seems, and they've done a good job of limiting (pun?) the amount of controls.

[Viitalahde]

It's not as complicated as it seems, and they've done a good job of limiting (pun?) the amount of controls.

Indeed, I find the Pro-L to be very intuitive, and I hate extra controls. This limiter has quickly become my to-go limiter, I use it for everything. Elephant can sometimes be technically more accurate, but the Pro-L just sounds better.

[KAyo]

I think this is exactly the kind of mix that either needs pretty heavy EQ or no EQ. It would be interesting to hear if anybody else found EQ to be hard to apply here.

Totally agree..
It felt at times as if EQ was a hindrance, but, once administered, then, one had to find a novel solution to resolve. I had good moments with the MD3, until I faulted and moved onto to the Redline and went cross eyed. My biggest impediment to date is the lacking of a sub set-up. All conversations on my end are null and void, until that’s fixed.

Ciao’
KAyo

[aivoryuk]

Hi all

Here is my technique.

I thought the mix had great energy and I wanted to capture that and just clear up of some of the small tonal imbalances.

My equaliser chain was
Sonoris parallel 11 Khz -0.5 mid bell just to tame the the drum cymbals

Abbey Road eq
256Hz -2 mid bell just to clean some mud out
1.05Khz + 0.5ish mid bell to bring the vocals out
4Khz mid bell +0.5ish mid bell to bring a little clarity

I didn't use comperssion initally and to get the level I used Gclip but did not use the input gain I turned the clip down to 33%
To bring the level up I used the barricade limiter but its just used as a gain stage no limiting takes place (every limiter has it's own sound even when they are doing no limiting)

At this point I was pretty happy but the bass end and cymbals were still poking a bit so I used the Waves Linmb at the start of the chain. I never use multiband as when I think it is sounding good I take it and always find it sounds better without but on this occasion I think it helped.
freq rage between 110Hz and 150Hz just diping every slightly.

For the cymbals which was inserted after the Sonoris I used Spitfish at around 11Khz

To finish I used Waves IDR for dither. I don't normally use this one but it sounded more like the original source then some of the other ones I tried.

Great track and I was pleased with my efforts as I haven't mastered anything for 6 months due to other commitments.

[fuse]

In short:

UAD - Massive Passive EQ emphasize mids +3dB @ 680Hz +3dB @ 3k9
UAD - Camebridge EQ Cut down sub low 40Hz
UAD - Multiband 1.05 expansion on mid en hi-mid bands
PSP - Vintagewarmer knee at 15% and drive -4dB and saturation on mid and high band at -3dB (took away too much high)
UAD2192
Ibis +1dB @ 1k48 -1dB @4k98
STC8 some gentle compression (prolly overdone it because it took away too much dynamics)
P38 in full limiting mode with TH just enough to move the needle every so gently
UAD2192
Ozone limiter with TH @ -0.3dB and Mbit light dithering

[ggidluck]

The track sounded a bit distant overall. When the bass started playing I got the impression that it was clouding up the track. I also felt like the vocals needed a bit of something to make the words more intelligible.

Up until this point I have worked totally ITB, and this WUMP was a bit of an experiment for me into a bit of analog compression. Eq was done in the box but I wanted to use the tubes to level out the track and increase the level.

I am using an RME Multiface (for analog in/out) and an ART PROVLA II for the tube compression. The VLA was upgraded to Mullard tubes shortly beforehand. (Hopefully soon an FCS compressor will be in the works).

Separate eq treatment was done for mid and side. Using Samplitude Pro 11 here. As far as method, in the software I bounce a file for mid/side and put each on a separate stereo track. Then eq is done in the object editor. Gain was set for mid and side at 2.2 db each.

===== MID =====

EQ116:
-6 @106 Hz Q=10 (notch out that bass a bit)
+4 @230 Hz low shelf
+3 @10K hi shelf

Parametric:
low cut @ 80 hz
+6 4500 Q=4.0 (add a little something for the vocal)

===== SIDE =====

Parametric:
low cut @ 120 hz
+6 @ 6K Q=4 (something to help the vocal here too)
+3 @ 9200 hi shelf

===============

out of the DAW into the PRO VLA
threshold -2.0 (about 2 o'clock position)
ratio about 2.5:1
output level +1 (about 12 o'clock position)
attack 0.25 (fastest it will go)
release 1 sec (3 o'clock position)

No compression or limiting was done in the box.


 

[DOMC]

im learning less is more from this

[Twerk]

im learning less is more from this

That's the case for just about every job I do. I think it's easy to get carried away with processing because we love the tools, the plug-ins, the theories, the process, the twiddling.

[Patrik_T]

...

[KAyo]

Yup yup..
Less is more, especially on this one. Good learning. Restrain is key many a times.

By the way, bought the sub- B&W ASW 650. Now, comes the task of getting it to sit well with the speakers etc..

Ciao’
KAyo

[nisilen]

i love reading what you guys did. a question for you fabfilter folks...what's up with the limiter attack times? thousands of milliseconds?

I can answer this as I developed two of the algorithms (transparent and dynamic).

I actually tried getting the fabfilter folks to "hide" the values of the knobs and instead just write fast -> slow at the edges of the knob, to force people to actually listen and not think "gee.. these values are ridiculously large and make no sense!".

The thing is, to make FabFilter Pro-L a hard clipper, well, ALMOST a hard clipper (the transparent algorithm will always be program dependent no matter what values you set), you'll need to open up the attack fully. Yeah, set it to that ridiculously large value of 10 seconds. 

The attack values really do not make sense because the knob itself controls quite a lot of internal parameters and basically it is a balancing knob.. or you could call it a mix knob. It balances the amount of audio that is sent to the various internal detectors. The fast detector/envelope path and the slow detector/envelope path. If you set attack to minimum, Pro-L's slow capacitor/envelope will be dominating and thus give you much longer program dependent release times. If you set attack to maximum then the short, almost instantaneous detector path will dominate and Pro-L becomes a clipper.

It's a bit tricky to explain but think of it as a balancing and timing knob that tells the limiter how large "chunks" of transients it will let through before it engages the slow envelope to prevent distortion from happening.

All this is probably explained better in the manual but I'm too lazy to open it up and paste it from there.

Cheers and sorry for the offtopic stuff! Interesting reading the WUMP techniques even though I haven't heard the song in question!

Cheers!
Niklas

[MoreSpaceEcho]

hey thanks for that explanation! that makes it much easier to understand.