I just setup the ARC Studio 4 and I'm finding the unit clips at fairly low levels. It definitely could not be used while mastering and its barely usable while mixing. I'm wondering if my unit us just defective or if other people have had a similar experience. I haven't used it as a plugin yet because I really don't want to keep turning it on and off, - just the hardware so far. Thanks in advance.

Hi everyone,

If a Q factor of 0.7 (or 1 in fabfilter) = 1 octave wide (i.e. the doubling of frequencies, e.g. the octave of 100 Hz is 200 Hz), then why doesn't the width of the filter change depending on which frequency you place it?

Using Pro-Q as an example, but this can be said for any EQ:

See Image

Is the GUI lying to us? If so, Is this done for the simple reason that if you look at two bands with matching Q values, they literally LOOK the same. But surely it would be better to show what ranges the Q is ACTUALLY affecting.

Thanks in advance

Can someone explain this to me? I have mastered a song in Cubase with a Fabfilter L2 as last plugin in the master chain. It limits to -0.1dB. Now I have opened the file into Amadeus Pro (sample editor), and wanted to use L2 to dither to 16 Bit. But Amadeus Pro still shows me two peaks at the beginning of the song that are limited by -0.4dB, so basically going 0.4dB above 0.0dB.

How can this happen?

Hey does anyone know of a microphone that does very well with soft breathy almost vocals as well as screaming? I know nothing about microphones and haven’t been able to find a clear answer online so I thought I’d ask here. This is my first microphone to record vocals with and I want to get somethings that can handle loud screaming and very soft singing really well. I have a 1,000 budget maybe 1,500 max.

I created a video in Premiere Pro.

When I try to upload the video to a platform, I recieve the following feedback:

Maximum allowed Relative Gated Loudness: -23 LUFS Maximum allowed True Peak value: -3dBFS

We measured the file video_1.mxf to have the following values: Relative Gated Loudness: -10.9719667434692 LUFS True Peak value: -0.260820239782333 dBFS

How do I fix this?

I dont even understand how -11 can be to much if the limit is -23?!

Please help 🙏

Saw a clip of jaycen Joshua and he talks about wanting most of his highend coming from vocals and that people forget about mixing snare and hihat with each other.

But he doesn’t say what he does for that.

Could you tell me how you are making those three work together?

Elevated jam tracks is awesome for practicing along to. Much respect to Tom.

However, the recordings don't sound like a commercial album. For example: Dirty Blues rock

Compared to something like Black Crowes - Gone

How would you even describe the sonic differences between the two? I don't have the proper language to describe it, but in my mind, and just in terms of recording and mixing (not songwriting) the elevated track is like our Sun - large, nebulous, gaseous. Whereas 'Gone' is like a collapsed star - all the elements of the song are hard, solid, small and dense. What's a better way of describing that?

And what are the biggest factors or audio decisions that can turn a recording like the former towards the latter? What is it that makes one song sound like elevator music (like my own home recordings), and another sound like something you want to crank up and rock out to? Where does that extra energy and density mainly come from?

Thanks.

I have an SM7b and love it, mainly used for spoken word in my case, but more frequently than not I find that with certain voices (especially deep boomy ones) it really takes a lot of eq to sound right. Is there another mic that has similar performance in terms of room noise rejection but that has a less dark sound that will work better with deeper voices?

Hey fam, I've been trying to find that plugins that do something unique or at least rare. There's a million eq's, compressors, etc but I was wondering if you can recommend or any odd or special ones. Thanks!

Hello guys, I've been watching a very old tutorial on creating typical "progressive house" sounds, and one of the most emblematic sounds in this genre is the multiband sidechain on a pluck.

I can easily accomplish that via stock plugins (Ableton audio effect rack, one chain has a lowpass, the other has a highpass filter + different shapers for both), and I can also "upgrade" to using Pro-MB for the band separation, or use an all-in-one plugin such as Shaperbox, and I can achieve a decent result with all of them.

However, in the tutorial, the real magic happens via an oldschool plugin by Vengeance Sound, named "Multiband Sidechain" (filter types are in the upper right corner in the picture). While in theory it does the exact same thing as all of the techniques I described above, I can clearly see in the tutorial, that the "magic" begins at the end, when the presenter sets the filter type of the band separation to "notch".

... The thing is, I can't wrap my head around how a notch filter can be used to achieve band separation... I tried recreating the sound step by step, and I get equivalent results up until the point where the filter is set to "notch", at which point their sound turns into gold, and I'm just stuck struggling to recreate it.

Has any OG used the plugin in question, and can you explain how it actually works?

Edit: Wow y’all are quick and helpful! My question has definitely been answered already. Thank you all so much! As an editor for new media advertising, I’m not really close to any of this personally, so I really appreciate this very thoughtful knowledge. Thanks so much!

I’ve worked with enough final distribution files for movies and big budget tv shows now in post as an editor to see one thing in common - the dialogue, background noise, SFX, and music are all always on separate tracks. The music and SFX obviously make sense, but how is the audio so meticulously recorded? The dialogue and background noise are always, and I mean always, perfectly separated. Soloing each layer sounds like it’s all ADR and foley, which just cannot be the case for every scene. These actors are expensive and no company in the world has the money to ADR a whole movie/tv show. Are boom mics just that good at being directional? Even in scenes that are in public spaces it sounds like it’s studio recorded, and the environment noise sounds like no one is speaking at all. Can a good audio tech really just record all that perfectly separately? How do they do that?

Or is it really just a game of trying to get the crispest, most isolated dialogue possible, then a sound designer (or team, rather) in post foleys the whole movie?

Ik that’s a crazy thing to say but I don’t know something about it just sits right with me like being able to hear it is just satisfying

Hi all! Sorry if this kind of post comes up every day.

I'm 23 and I've been learning audio engineering for about 2 years now, I've been in school for 1.5 (audio engineering), I graduate in April. I'm really worried for my future in this. I knew going into it the difficulty of doing anything but grunt work was extremely difficult, but now that my graduation is nearing, I'm scared of my future in this field. I really want to be a mixing engineer and I'm extremely dedicated, I mix a lot, like a few songs a week (I think this is a lot for my level lol) and I can definitely see I'm improving and learning.

Just I'm still so worried I will never be able to do this for money or even anything adjacent. I'm afraid of being stuck doing grunt work for a live sound company for the rest of my life, which would probably just send me back to school.

I'm looking at other avenues like sound design for media and broadcasting but they all seem so difficult to get into, I honestly feel like I made a mistake attempting to reach this goal. It just seems so impossible recently.

Just looking for advice and maybe personal stories to perhaps lift up my mood a bit.

Thanks!

Edit: compressor, not eq.

What type of compressor is this modeled after? Is it a vca?

People talk really good about it what I have seen. I probably will try the demo tomorrow, but wondered what type of compressor this is?

Hey gang!

So I was tasked writing a 70s/80s yacht rock/adult contemporary track for a film and this track was a big reference.

https://youtu.be/wRO5nqvxieQ?si=aLSCTA9eU8mlyhIy

Im a big CC fan, but I’ve never really taken the time to appreciate the layering of the keyboards, specifically once the band comes in.

My thought is that it’s either a CP70 or a very bright piano of some sort, layered in with a DX7 ep and maybe a flute-esque synth sound?

I know there are vibes/mallets hiding somewhere in there as well and some acoustic strumming, but what do yall hear?

I’ve got Arturia Lab V so hopefully it shouldn’t be to tough to get close!

Thanks!

Hey all,

My band has recently decided that in top of our own guitar and bass tracking we are also going to move to tracking our own drums and vocals from now on and send everything off for mixing and mastering.

This comes from the unfortunate fact that the guy who tracked and mixed our last few releases is pulling away from recording anything for the next long while for his mental healths sake, and there’s only one other studio in town who’s owner is quite a toxic member of the community and we’d rather not deal with them.

I’m already mid way through properly treating our space and my next step will be finding a set of drum mics worth using.

The music we are playing is in that metalcore/ easycore/ pop punk area of sound, think Alexosonfire, A Day to Remember, Four Year Strong. Drummer is on a 1 up 1 down kit with 2 crashes, a ride, hats and a china.

I’m fully aware we are going to have to put down a good chunk of money which we are fine with as the bands been doing quite well, but I’m also wanting to find the good balance of quality and affordability. Ideally I’d like to stay around $1000-$1500 Canadian but I’m willing to hear about places the extra money would make a difference.

Right now we have an SM57 on the snare and a cheap Chinese mic set on the rest of the kit we’ve used for iems during rehearsal so anything’s going to make a difference.

Learning about compression and wonder when would be a better usecase for each?

To my understanding, probably wrong, they have similar characteristics.

Could somebody explain?

Also I was reading ssl Bus comp is so good on group/mix buses. What’s special about them compared to other vca compressors?

And Opto and/or Vari Mu also good on group/mix buses? Why or why not?

Thanks for helping me to understand things a bit better in advance

Hi everyone, hope you're all well.

Anyone here backup their projects onto Google drive? If so, I read someone mentioning earlier that Google drive can rename some files making it difficult to use them unless you zip the folders... is this true?

Figure it's probably no problem, makes sense to zip before backing up... but I'm just a little curious on this one.

Cheers

I've got a video where several people are having a conversation, but it's at night with a lot of consistent cricket noise. You can hear people talking and make out words here and there especially when I'm concentrating with noise cancelling headphones, but it's difficult to make out the conversation with all the crickets.

I've read about tools like Izotope with Dialogue Isolate, but spending that much to isolate voices in a couple minutes of video is a bit much for me. Does anyone have a recommendation on someone with the right software who might be able to do this for me? I'd be happy to pay a reasonable fee. :-)

Hopefully this is the right place for this.

TL;DR: How much quality am I missing out on not being able to use LDAC and using 660Kbps Dual Channel SBC @ 48Khz with the Alternative A2DP driver (I think this is also known as SBC HD - it isn't XQ)? I do stream "lossless" music from Apple Music for music, watch movies/TV with high quality audio + games. Otherwise, the majority of use is YT videos + Discord + mostly sources like that which aren't going above ~256-320Kbps anyway. Should I return the Buds 3 Pro for the XM5s so I can just use LDAC, or should I splurge on Technics AZ80? Or am I just not really losing any meaningful audio quality here? I feel like I do lose some quality switching from SSC on phone to my PC with SBC. Pic of settings - https://i.imgur.com/WdxZuzs.png (I can change Loudness to SNR, not sure what that does, but otherwise this is all maxed out)

I'm also looking at getting a new pair of wired headphones, my budget on that is $400ish maybe, more depending on what I do with these headphones. I was considering just grabbing refurb XM5s to go with the buds 3 pro. I do most of my listening on my PC.

SSC (Samsung's high end bluetooth codec, 24bit/96khz) only works on Samsung devices, it sounds great on my S23 Ultra.

On windows they default to SBC with a bitpool of 52. The default SBC limitations are pretty poor, with a maximum bitrate of 330Kbps. With an alternative bluetooth driver, you can change it to "Dual Channel" which is a bitrate of 660Kbps.

LDAC is 990Kbps and I know SSC is similar.

I realize XM5 supports LDAC - Are these the way to go instead? I was able to change the bitpool limitation to about 900 Kbps (though it crackled on the buds pro) and I could definitely hear a difference, especially with Apple Music at lossless quality. I've never tried anything with LDAC so I can't compare. I would say the sound isn't quite as full on my phone with SSC, but this could be due to other reasons too. Separation of instruments is still pretty good on my PC but I feel like I lose some quality.

I was used to using K702s that need to be repaired (wires need re soldering) and MDR V6'S that need the same treatment with a Marantz PM6004 amp which I still use with some high end Mission Audio loudspeakers from the 80s and drive headphones very well. So I'd say I have good reference points for sound, and I'd like to recapture some of that quality. And hopefully just fix my K702s soon... have had a hard time finding where to do that even though the fix is simple.

Side note is I still get occasional crackle or stutter even at the 660Kbps in Dual Channel on my Buds 3 Pro, not so with my $80 Q30s. I was able to push the bitrate to 900-960Kbps on the Buds 3 and they'd break up/crackle a bit more but I definitely think it helped, at least with a source like Apple Music.

If you could use ANY microphone to mic a kit in a studio (with your preamp of choice, what would you use?

I'm not saying I have unlimited cash to spend on drum mics but I feel like what I have could use an update.

If I can find a picture of my kit on this computer I'll add it to this post.

I'm not looking for recommendations per se, just what YOU would choose to use if you had your selection of any mic, new, old, vintage, whatever.

I'm also looking to poll this sub, since I haven't been here in a while.

For this purpose, let's say I have one of those large prog rock drumkit with far too many toms and cymbals.

More granular:

• Single kick drum (resonant head completely off)

• 14" Snare

• 8" Tom

• 10" Tom

• 12" Tom

• 14" Tom

• 16" Tom

• Two Rides

• Two Hihats

• Six Crashes

• Four Splashes

• Two China/Trash

I am also open to multichannel rack AND 500 mic preamps, because that's always a fun conversation.

I'm currently using 3 4-channel rack pres with pretty different sounds:

1. API 3124 (no V or MV)
2. SSL PureDrive Quad
3. Portico 500s
4. Cranborne 500s
5. Other stuff but spacing.

As I posted before, I’m continuing to recreate some sounds that I like (and learning a lot from them!!). This time I chose this song by Paul that I love, and to my surprise, I was able to get a result that I liked pretty quickly!!!

My version

The original one

I see that I’m improving, listening better, and capturing the nuances of the music more quickly. The other song I posted here took me about a month; this one I did in a week.

For those who have asked me what I learned from the last song, I still can’t explain it well; I do a lot by instinct, but I’ll try to share some tips.

• Drives can really help hi-hats sound fuller and with fewer transients.
• Don’t be afraid of EQs; they can really help give personality to sounds.
• Don’t believe everything on YouTube; not everything needs a compressor.
• Synthesizers are really hard to set up :)

Please, if I said anything silly, correct me. As I said, I’m learning by instinct and on my own, so I’m just sharing my impressions of what I hear.

This is my last post here. I don’t want to spam with these posts every time I do something, but I think it’s nice to share my process (and usually, I’m happy and have no one to show it to, except my wife, LOL). My goal is to learn and create my own music, but I feel that these productions are just for study, for now. Maybe I could do some live streams on YouTube showing the process, but I don’t think I could do many hours of streaming since I usually work slowly.

Hey everyone, I’m trying to recreate this arpeggiator effect from the beginning of the song “black seminole” of lil yachty and whist watching a reaction video, this guy mentioned a vintage "arpegginator synth” (0:52)? Does anyone know what it is? also any help to re-create this arp effect (using a VST like ominsphere or something) would be awesome! I'm really struggling to get a nice fluid control on the arp without having to program it note by note. Thank youuuuuu!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRF5NXGuLCI

I have protools 2024.06 and an Apollo 8. I need to record some horns and was just considering having the 2 horn players record themselves playing to a click with an iPhone and sending me the video, which I would then mix into the track. I am going for an 80s English beat sound, so not having a pristine recording isn’t the worst thing. I’m going to try to make it sound like an analog, saturated mix anyhow.

Is this just too ghetto for life? Is there a better option if I want to do it remotely? I don’t think they have DAWs or mics at their locations and this is a free project so there’s no money for local studio options etc.

I'm trying to get the best sound possible out of an absolutely tiny space (2x4m, see image for layout/plan), and I thought I'd see if anyone here has any suggestions.

https://imgur.com/a/Fw3mbdk

If the image isn't available, here's a brief summary:

• 2m x 4m (x 2.5m tall)
• Drywalls all around
• Window and door on the two short walls
• 2m long hardwood desk in the corner by the window, facing a long wall
• Dual screens and 5" studio monitors on top of the desk
• 20cm deep wall shelf 60cm above the desk
• Low cabinet opposite the desk (same height as desk)
• Resting head position in the middle of the room, 1m from the front, back and the window side wall
• Edit/PS: The sofa in the image is a placeholder for a sim racing rig, it's not really repositionable

Unfortunately the room layout is pretty much locked in for practical reasons, so one might treat it as a 2x2m room with one open end to the side of the desk.

I have a couple of monitor options (Presonus Eris 5, Yamaha NS5, premium bookshelf speakers) - but all have similar issues. I also own an 8" Presonus sub which can not be used 100% of the time as I live in an apartment.

I have not been able to objectively measure the room response, but my subjectively observed issues (using sine sweeps and reference tracks) are

• Very noticeable spikes around 130, 210, 290 hz
• Very noticeable dips around 90, 180 and 230 hz
• Slight spike at 315hz
• Acceptable "flatness" above 330hz

Note that these issues are without sub, so I don't fully trust what I hear below 70-80hz.

Due to my issues being isolated to the lower frequencies I was hoping I could somewhat mitigate this by treating the corners or adding traps - but I'm a complete novice when it comes to room acoustings so I'm hoping someone in here could give me a few tips/pointers.

I do a fair bit of corporate mixing and this year a few fair bit of french canadians company, normally I find myself educating people on the importance of speaking into mic. Pivot around a podium, consistent distance with handheld, head and shoulders being more locked with a lav.... Why do we use anything but a headset in live non-music event.

Anyway with french canadians I find I have to teach them to take the podium mic out of their mouths. Many times ive seen them hunch over to be closer to the mic just to then back away and slam back into giving mind boggling db swings that only the fastest fingers on the planet can keep up with.

Its happen so many time im wondering if I'm alone, or is there a cultural reaon for it?

hi everyone, just like what i said at the top my guitars shocking me or i sometimes feel some electric current in my strings, which feels really weird on my fingers , so i was recording this song i made on my laptop a couple of weeks ago, i tried this both on my guitar and bass cause i was tracking both of them, and i dont really remember how it went, but what happened was i was playing my guitar and i got zapped on my elbow cause it was resting on the bridge, at that point i already felt some current in my fretting hand but it didnt really worry me that much, then when i pick up my bass it was way worst playing on it, i was really feeling the electric current touching my finger tips, i was so afraid of getting electrocuted each time i started playing i would wipe my hands cause i was nervous at that point, i dont really know what the problem is tbh, for some information if thisll help, lately ive just switched to a laptop, the device ive used to record was a computer, i was still getting zapped by the bridge area back then but i wasnt really feeling any current on the strings, the audio interface im using is a riworal q-24 i plug it to my laptop directly for power and connection

Serious question. I was once in a band with an audio engineer who had a bachelors and he still is the most annoying laziest prick ever. Put no work in after graduating and was furious at the world when nobody gave a shit he had a bachelors.

I need a good IEC analog sim plugin. Tempted to get the PSP thing? Help? Also how about a good dolby A simulator? Help again?

Hi everyone,

Would you please share your experience by using AI-powered mastering tools? Is it the one you used? Is it worth it? (price/performance)