Lessons with PhantomOftheOpera

The gate prevents very quiet (not completely silent) signals from being played. If the threshold of a gate would be set to 80% of the input, then you could not hear anything that is quieter than 80%, resulting in only the loudest parts of the gated signal to be heard.

Ahh... neat. So it's basically good for cleaning out signals from lets say, distorted guitars, to get rid of amp and effects pedal noises?

Even better - Once you have a recording that contains two people chatting in the background you could easily get rid of it by gating the recorded signal.

You would have to sweep the threshold knob until you reach a value that cuts away any unwanted information but still is at the lowest possible position (to keep the recording as original as possible) and once the primary instrument is played it will simply drown out the unwanted signals. Combining this with an Equalizer has already brought me some amazing results.

Look at the thread that contained the limiter and gate thing - in the head of every major post about effects i will contain every effect i explained as well as every knob or term i explained, so that you can simply come back here to look up something again without having to read through every line of every post again.

Okay, that

Kk, thanks again T. See you soon. Cheers!

Effects:

• Peak Controller

Terms:

none

Plenty of time today, i can start explaining some more complicated things now! Let

Uhmm... heavy one... :D I'm at work now, so I will need to spend some time with this tonight. I'll let you know if I have some questions after that.

Yes, it

Well, I understood all (I think) about mixer routing. I quite get the peak utility too (more or less, but I'll have to play around with it more).

I have one question regarding the peak tool tho'. Is there a practical use of automating mixer channels with peak tool in an actual song making process? I just cannot imagine why would you want to use that. Except for maybe lowering the volume of some instrument when other instrument starts to play, but you can do that with velocity settings in piano roll... I'm asking this because I feel like I am missing the big picture here... :)

So far, you got one very important purpose of this thing, although this goes a little beyond only changing the overall volume of another instrument.

This might be the major purpose of this thing for your productions, because you will have to work a lot with this foreground / background thing, but once you start to experiment a little with electronic approaches you will see that the capabilities of creating new textures of sounds depend on your creativeness and inquisitiveness (especially when working with synthesizers).

And then there are things such as the Gate effect or a limiter. You can build these things on your own now; well, you might say that you could just use a VST that enables you to gate or limit signals, but then there are things that a peak controller can do that these things can

Nope... this now sums it up pretty nicely. I'm ready for the compressor.

Will start tomorrow as soon as i can, have a nice day!

Hey, I have one technical question, thought you'd be a good person to ask.

My laptop (IBM thinkpad) with its built in sound-card is incapable of recording. Namely, it has a built-in mini-microphone, to be used for voice recording of conversations, notes to self, etc.

When I connect a keyboard to it, and switch recording on in any recording software, I get the recording but only trough it's built in mini-mic (speakers turned on and reproducing what i play, and that gets recorded into my track, not the actual line in, or maybe both, but I still get the sound of my breathing, fingers tapping the keys, all sorts of sounds...) I tried plugging in the line-in and mic input, and nothing changed.

If I disable the microphone in the control panel, I get no sound at all (which is weird), and I tried uninstalling the mic drivers, and now I get a really faint signal and no wave-forms when I record.

I really have no idea what is happening, I've never even heard of this kind of a problem...

First thing to check would be this window:

Then visit the Options > Properties and look if there

Yeah, I know about the midi interface, I intend to buy it. But my keyboard has some really nice choirs that I like, I mostly use it for that. I have checked the sound control panel earlier, but it seems that there is just no disabling the built in mic without disabling the whole line in of the soundcard... really annoying..

Let me know if you managed to fix the problem - i would like to know what it was...

The Compressor

After looking at 47 pages of google image search results for the term "compressor" i decided to draw my own draft:

I got a little... dragged away...

Any questions? ._.

Here, this is an image concerning the knee http://www.bandtreff.ch/Bandraum/Gitarre/pic/compressor2.jpg , and another one where the axes are named correctly http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3e/Compression_knee.svg/450px-Compression_knee.svg.png :]

Audio examples are next. We will compress drums.

You see, if you compress with a ratio of oo : 1 (while oo represents unlimited) then you pretty much have the effect of limiting a signal. Limiters also have an Attack / Release state and a Threshold that defines when to limit. And most of them also have a post gain, so that the only difference between the limiter and the compressor would be the Ratio setting.

For the Multiband compressor: This tool is much more complex than the common Fruity Compressor. It allows you to have three different compressor set-ups that apply to different frequency bands - all of these setting, as well as the frequency crossover points, can be defined manually so that you actually have three compressors packed in one tool. It also shows a graphical representation of the compressed and the dry signals, so you just might want to take a look at this thing.

But if you want to use it in a real project, be aware of the following:

If you want to compress a drum set then you will achieve best results if you compress the kick and snare drums [etc.] seperately - for a soundfont this would require you to load several instances of the soundfont player, all of them routed to different mixer tracks for each part of the drum set you play. Think of this as the final state of maximizing such a soundfont - it

Great, this doesn't look too complicated. I don't have time now, but I will do my homework this evening, so I'll post it tomorrow.

For our previous Input-to-Output mappings you can load the Fruity Waveshaper into your mixer and play around with this nice tool a little. The Waveshaper does nothing more than assigning Input to Output in a way that you can define graphically.

Try the things i showed you earlier (the limiter, gate). If you browse through the list of presets you will also see that this neat little tool is capable of doing much more than the things i showed you, but i guess you won

Weee, I'm done. Here's the link:

RapidShare: Easy Filehosting

I have a few questions tho'. I can see how compressing can do well for bass drums and such other low-end instruments, but I feel that the snare drum, hi-hats and cymbals sound kind of distorted. On what instruments do you usually do compression?

I guess I should have separated the bass drum in other channel and just compress it without the rest of the drumset.

Oh yeah, the parameters I used are:

treshold -30.5

ratio 6.3:1

gain 15.9

attack 165

release 282

Absolutely right, in order to make this drum set sound better you would have to split this thing up into every part of the set and apply different compressor settings to each. Please note that this thing sounds very realistic in its original form so you would only want to apply hard and detailed compressions if you wanted this to be less realistic - for purposes of fattening this thing up for example.

In soundtrack productions a fast paced set of drums can create such a high amount voltage that you wouldn

Well, I played with this things a little yesterday, I think I pretty much got it. Or at least understand it :D

Anyway, yeah sure, we can go on.

Concerning the compressor you will have a lot of experience to gather about different settings for different instruments - for now it

To me the goal of mastering is to have it connected to the original idea of the track - a connection between content and shape.

These two aspects lie at the very ends of the whole process and therefore you will achieve best results, if you have more than only two links in this chain. This is why i gave you my way to look at things, which consists of 4 aspects. This allows you to see every one of these aspects connected to another one.

Mastering can not be done without listening to a track. Listening by itself requires some basic understanding of the original idea and therefore having it split up into smaller parts like instruments and patterns will help to both think and communicate about the whole thing.

Mastering as the last step of this whole process has its prerequisites in the choice and way of playing the instruments and also the arrangement, while these two aspects (the X and the Y of your track) are strongly connected to the part to which i referred to as statement earlier.

This was a way to put it into absolute terms.

Relating this to your example you would look at it this way:

The drums at the last part of your track - don

Great, I did actually began to mess around with things we covered so far in my project track. I will keep at it.

Have a nice trip! :D

I

hey, hows it going?

Well, I've been working on that song of mine every day, and little by little I begin to get a feel of how certain things should be done. I just think that I need more time and practice to really get the hang of it.

I have one question tho'

I wanted to pump up the drums in my track some, but I constantly get the feeling I like it better without any effects. Should I just leave it as it is?

Oh, yeah, and what do we do with synth sounds, is there a need to enhance them with effects. It seems like a long shot to me, because they are already computer made and they should be top quality... right?