MODULATIONS PART 6: VOCODER! (with Free Vst plugins inside!!)

Hello and welcome to this week's article!
This tutorial is to be considered as an expansion of the Autotune article, since it shares with this the same basic concepts, but the Vocoder is a little different:
Vocoder is the contraction of the two words "voice encoder", and it consists into an algorhitm that takes a sound (usually a voice) and processes it throug a synth, basically morphing it and tuning it on the note chosen by the player, with a keyboard, or writing it on a piano roll Automation (click here for an article about automations).

This effect has been widely used throughout the '70s and '80 by the first electronic music bands, such as Kraftwerk or Giorgio Moroder, and by some progressive rock band as the Alan Parsons Project, and today the effect is used to give a voice the typical metallic sound of that time.

A Vocoder can be programmed almost the same way an Autotune can be:
First we need to create an audio track, which will contain the Vocals we want to effect, then we load into this track's insert the Vst Vocoder.
At this point we'll need to create a midi track, choosing the Vocoder as output.
Now we can draw on the midi piano roll of this track the notes we want our voice to go through, or we can play them in real time with a midi keyboard.


Here are some cool Vst Vocoder downloadable for free:

Tal Vocoder - an interesting vintage sounding Vocoder

Voctopus - 8 band real time Vocoder with built in synth

Braindoc Lpc Vocoder - a Linear Predicting Coding Vocoder

Vocovee - a real time Vocoder


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MODULATIONS PART 5: RING MODULATOR, OCTAVE, HARMONIZER! (with Free Vst Plugins Inside)

Hello and welcome to this week's article!
This is the fifth article about modulation effects, and today we're going to talk about ring modulator, octave and harmonizer!

- Ring Modulator: This effect is a sibiling of Tremolo, which, instead of having its amplitude rhitmically altered, it uses a copy of the sound itself very altered, or another sound.
Let's make an example: we put on a ring modulator two sounds: the sound of our voice and the sound of a guitar, the effect is like the guitar is "talking" to us, because the effect won't let out the single sounds, but just the "interaction" between them (e.g. Peter Frampton's "Talking Guitar").

- Octave: this one's much easier to explain, it consists into analyzing the input sound and creating a synth copy or more, one octave or more lower. This produces a deeper and more "bassy" sound, like the one that can be heard on Led Zeppelin's song "Fool in The Rain" guitar solo.
A particular type of Pitch Shifter that not only works with the octaves, but that alters the sound's pitch widely, even of many octaves, it's the Digitech Whammy pedal, often used by Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello.

- Harmonizer: this is a very particular type of pitch shifting (sometimes it's called intelligent pitch shifter), in which the effect creates a synth copy of the original sound that respects a certain harmonic distance (for example a third major, or a fifth minor...).
This effect is often used to process vocals or guitar, and it can be set at a certain scale related with the original sound, or midi-driven, and in this case it can change its scale at a pre-programmed moment. This effect is part of the trademark sound of many guitar players, from Brian May of Queen to Blind Guardian's guitarist Andrè Olbrich.

Unfortunately there are no common basic controls to analyze for these three effects, except for the Mix control, which sets the amount of original signal to leave unprocessed.
Then, according to the type of effect, we will have an octave control for the octave, a key control to set the scale on the harmonizer, and a control that will set the shape of the waveform for the Ring Modulator.
Some Octave processors for guitar also feature a Distortion control to add some growl to the processed signal.


Today some DAWs already feature some basic Octave, Harmonizer and Ring Modulation Effect, but if you want to try something new and different here's a selection of the best freeware effects available:

Ring-O - A nice, vintage looking, ring modulator

ST-Rmod - An interesting stompbox-style ring modulator

Stereo Vrek - A creative Lo-Fi delay / ring modulation effect

Ringer - A simple, easy to use ring modulator

SubGen - A stompbox-style Octave plugin

Harmonisator - A simple harmonizer plugin


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HOW TO DO AUDIO EDITING (a guide for dummies) PART 1/2

Hello and welcome to this week's article! Today we're going to talk about audio editing!
Audio Editing is the single most important and time-consuming task to accomplish before starting mixing, in the Project Preparation Phase, and it consists in the correction of all the little mistakes that needs to be fixed on the audio tracks, in order to sound properly and not to draw attenction.

Let's start by saying that not every small error needs to be fixed: sometimes some slight acceleration or deceleration made by the drummer may improve the groove, sometimes producers even speed up the metronome of a couple bpm on purpose on choruses, in order to make them even more energetic, on a subliminal level.
Also the interpretation nuances of Vocals or guitar solos should be left alone, what really needs to be edited are the macroscopic errors done especially on the rhythmic side, manily by Drums, but also by Bass, rhythm Guitars or some attacks of Vocals and the other audio recorded instruments.

Today there are different solutions in order to help us on our editing tasks, especially for drums, Pro Tools has a feature called "Elastic Audio" that helps editing by marking the audio peaks and quantizing or moving them automatically, also there are other plugins called Beat Detection Tools, which are capable of finding the bpm and help you modifying the track, but we will today focus on the "Slip Editing" which consists into slicing and dicing the audio tracks and moving them, and is the only Free option among these.

- Techniques:  Slip Editing consists into cutting the tracks at the "Zero Point", which is the last silence (0db) part of an audio track right before the start of a sound, and moving the part forward or backward of a few milliseconds, in order to set it on perfect time. To do this many DAWs offers the "Snap to Grid" option, which helps us finding the right place, where the bar starts, if we set the right metronome and quantization for our project: this is very important, since many details of our mix are driven by metronome and quantization, for example the Delay Repetitions, so set this carefully. The metronome and the quantization of our project are MIDI driven, so the "Snap to Grid" option will snap the audio parts on the MIDI grid, which can be divided in 1/8, 1/16, 1/32 and so on, in order to be more precise for the positioning. 

When editing, thus applying a change in the continuity of an audio track, there is the problem of how to fill the gaps at the beginning or the end of the track that we have moved: usually if our track slips below another track that starts at the right time there is no problem, since the new sound will take the place of the old one at the right moment, but if we create a gap of silence, this is going to be noticed, so we will need to solve this problem with Time Stretching:
Time Stretching tools (like the Cubase bundled "Audio Warp") are plugins that helps us in widening or shortening the lenght of a sound while mantaining the pitch unaltered; his can be a solution for filling the small silence parts that are generated when cutting an audio part.
Another tool we have in order to "blend in" two parts that were originally distant, in order to make them less feel like one is replacing another, is Cross Fading: this technique consists into creating a quick fade out on the first track and a fade in on the new one, in order to give the impression that there's perfect continuity between the two sounds.
Luckily all the new DAWs and Audio editing Softwares features a Fade In - Fade Out tools.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE PART 2/2 OF THIS ARTICLE!

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HOW TO USE DRUMAGOG AND THE OTHER DRUM REPLACERS (free Vst plugins and samples inside)

Hello and welcome to this week's article! Today we're going to talk about Drum Replacement!

Drum replacement is a very common technique nowadays, and it consists in taking the peaks of a drum track (an audio track, or even a MIDI) using a level analizer, setting a threshold like we're using a Compressor, and every peak that exceedes that threshold is considered by the program a hit to be replaced with a midi sample of our choice.

This technique can be used to replace virtually anything with any sample, but it has been developed specifically for drums, because this is the application where it really turns out to be useful: to add the sound of an already processed snare, kick or tom to the original sound we have recorded and blend them, in order to give more punch, clarity and "professional vibe" to our songs.

Those plugins usually gives you the opportunity to "refine the search" of the peaks to be replaced, supporting Equalization filters and a volume fader, in order to isolate as much as possible the range of sounds to be processed, since it's a common problem to have replaced more sounds that we need, for example a long-tailed snare hit may be interpreted as more than one single sound so the plugin may add a double or triple hit on it. It takes some practice to set up the software so that only the sounds we need are replaced.

- The first and best drum replacement program around is Drumagog, it comes with some sample bundled sample and lets you use Wave files and the proprietary .GOG standard, which supports multisampling in order to assign the right sample according to the Velocity of every hit.

Another very interesting and useful feature is the "Blend" control, that lets you choose the percentage of original and triggered sound you want, mixing them.

- The second plugin I suggest is Slate Drums, which is a bit more expensive but comes in bundle with great samples.

- The third plugin in order of quality is ApTrigga, which is cheap, light, and very effective.

- Drumtrig, is FREE, and very easy to use. Similiarly to Aptrigga, Drumtrig has a clean interface, but with less controls.

- Boxsounds Replacer, is FREE and lets you load up to four sample layers.

- KTDrum Trigger is another FREE plugin that allows you replace sounds, and this one supports up to three different frequency bands, thus is possible to replace more than one sound at the same time (anyway is suggested to open a single instance for every single drum part, to avoid errors).

Now we must choose the right samples. There are many sample packs around, and among them a very good pack is LSD DRUMS, or the Slate Drums pack, but surfing the web you can also stumble upon some good free sample library, just try searching on the Ultimate Metal and the Mixingtips forum. You can even create your own samples by microphoning a real drum or ripping the single samples from your favourite album, just make sure to find a song where the drum part is playing alone, or you will sample something of the other instruments too!

Once we have replaced all the drum parts we need (usually snare, kick and toms, since is not a good idea to replace the cybmals as the sampled ones tend to sound a bit "unnatural"), it's time to head to the "cleaning" part: clean all the midi drum tracks of the "double hits" accidentally taken by the software, correct the eventual timing and quantization errors (if the samples are replacing a real microphoned drum track), adjust the Velocity to the right levels when needed (just remember to not make it completely flat or you will lose all the dynamics of the drumming), and after this phase we will have a perfectly edited triggered drum track, which is ready to be mixed (and with the right samples, more than 50% of the mixing job is already done!).

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HOW TO USE AUTOTUNE (free VST plugins inside)

Hello and welcome to this week's article! Today we're going to talk about how to correct the pitch of vocals, or any other instrument. These pitch correction tools are usually plugins that takes a wave sound and drag it as it was a midi sample, higher or lower on the piano roll in order to match the correct note you need. 

In the last few years the technology has been developed in order to limit the inevitable degradation of a sound that is pitch shifted, especially when applied the vocal parts, which are the ones where the pitch correction is more noticed: today the pitch correction is blended with the introduction of a synth line almost inaudible right below the vocal, in order to help it to sound more "in tune". 

Obviously the pitch correction part should be seen as a "last resort", to use only if you notice, before starting the mixing phase, that there are some errors that cannot be recorded again, but that at the same time are too big to not be noticed, and that risk to ruin the song.
First off let's say that auto tuning tools works fine only with clean, monophonic sounds: any kind of background noise, or rasp vocals, or distorted sound may be misinterpreted by the algorithm and lead to mistakes. It's also suggestable to process the vocal parts without sibilant letters (s), and the guitar - bass parts where there are no slides-bendings.

There are two types of autotuning tools:

1) Automated Pitch Correctors: These are the kind of tools, such as Antares Autotune, or the free Gsnap and Kerovee, where you can choose the key of the song and other parameters, and let the plugin to automatically slide the wave on the piano roll, in order to match in real time the scale used on the song. It's a good thing not to leave it activated for the whole song, but to Automate it in order to be switched on only when needed, and turned off when unnecessary. It is also possible to create a MIDI track and route the plugin on it in order to manually decide the pitch as it was a regular synth, in facts today the industry standard is using Autotune manually, line by line, in Graphic Mode.

2) Pre - Scanning Pitch Correctors: These plugins, such as Waves Tune and Celemony Melodyne, works by pre-scanning the track and creating a "MIDI-like" version of the track itself inside their interface, so that you can use real-time autotuning (like an automated pitch corrector), or correct the pitch manually without creating an external midi track. Offline working (which means "not in real time") takes more time and efforts, but usually leads to a better result, since it leaves to you the decision of which single syllable (or even part of it) to be processed and which not. With the best Pre - Scanning pitch correctors, such as Melodyne, it's also possible to modify the single notes of a chord of an Acoustic Guitar, for example, just like a Midi file.

The famous/infamous "Cher effect" present on the song "Believe" has been obtained by forcing the vocals through wrong scales, or manually writing notes for the voice in order create that unnatural-sounding "glitch" (obviously in this case it has been an arrangement choice, but sometimes it's just a pure error).

In conclusion, regardless to the kind of plugin you may choose, autotuning should be used with extreme caution, only when impossible to record again, and only for the single parts that really needs it, since often is better to hear a more natural interpretation, although not perfectly in tune, than the "Midi-sounding" voice that sometimes can be heard, even on commercial songs. The risk is to have a completely flattened and lifeless voice, altough perfectly in tune :)

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MIDI Dynamics: How to adjust the Velocity (for more realistic MIDI drums)

Hello and welcome to this week's article!

Today we're going to talk about how to adjust/edit the Velocity parameter on a MIDI track!

The first MIDI samplers used to have just one sample for every sound (e.g. the legendary Roland TR-808, a hardware drum sampler with just one snare sample, one kick sample...), but through the years we've seen the arrival of always more accurate samplers, so now we have available huge libraries of sounds, and the most recent drum sequencers (which today are almost completely VST based) have many samples for each drum piece, (talking about Virtual Drums, but the same is for any other virtual instrument), divided by how hard the "virtual hand" would hit them, in order to give a more realistic result. 

Velocity is the intensity, the strenght of the "virtual hand" that hit the drum piece, and today it's an editable parameter, created in order to give a better realism to the MIDI instruments. Some MIDI instruments according to the Velocity you choose will choose the right sample, while others (the ones with fewer samples, or with just one) will apply an Envelope Filter on the sample in order to make it sound quieter or louder; eventually many MIDI instruments will apply a combination of these two methods.

Today, most of the commercial DAWs features a Velocity Editor (for example, in the Cubase/Nuendo interface is located on the lower side of the Piano Roll editor window), so you can manually choose the intensity of each hit: just select the midi part you've created on the Piano Roll, and it will select automatically the Velocity on the lower window (on the side menu you can decide the parameter to edit: Velocity, or Volume, or any other); 

from here, using the Pencil Tool you can move up or down the bar, and the higher it will be set, the louder the Velocity will be.

If you keep the left button of the mouse pressed you can trim the Velocity of all the notes in the Piano Roll if you want (e.g. creating a "Fade In Effect"), or just choose some of them to adjust and leave the others untouched. Many MIDI instruments features also a "Humanize" control (e.g. you can find it on the Toontrack drum sequencers), which automatically randomizes for example the velocity of the drum hits in order to make them sound more natural.

- HOW TO SET A MINIMUM AND MAXIMUM VELOCITY FOR THE RANDOMIZER: If you have a randomic velocity on your drum sequencer (or any other VST instrument), but you wish to set a minimum and/or a maximum Velocity so that the hits won't be weaker and/or stronger than a certain threshold, select the MIDI track and go to the MIDI Modifiers section: from here on the Random menu, choose "Velocity" and you'll be able to set a Minimum and a Maximum (from -120 to +120), so that all the hits on that track will respect that threshold.

- HOW TO SET A FIXED VELOCITY: If you want a Fixed Velocity, instead, just select on the MIDI Modifiers section the amount you want on the Velocity section (from -126 to +126), now all the new notes you will write on the Piano Roll will have the selected Velocity, and to set it on the notes already written, just select them, Right Click->Functions->Fixed Velocity.

- Addictional Awesomeness: Some quick tip to make a sampled drum track more realistic, by adjusting the Velocity. First off visualize how to play the parts you are going to write: nobody wants to listen to drums played unnaturally, just because the guy who wrote the part is not a drummer and has no clue of how to play it :D 

Then when writing a drum roll, think of which hand does each single hit, and make the hits with the right hand slighly harder than the ones made with the left hand (assuming that the drummer is right-handed), plus make the drum roll start harder and then get progressively softer as it ends.

When making a press roll part, or a blast beat part, lower the velocity of the snare, and raise it just on the accents, plus raise it progressively when heading toward a Drum Roll, or to a Fill, and remember that a real drummer usually the faster he goes the lighter he hits, in order to control better the movement of the sticks, and to save his stamina ;)

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How to use Automations and the Tempo Track (a guide for dummies)

Hello and welcome to this week's article! Today we're going to talk about Automations in Steinberg Cubase and Nuendo.

An Automation is a system which will memorize and playback the whole variations we make, applied to the different parameters of the mixboard: volume, Panning, Eq, effect level, etc

Do you want the volume on your lead guitar to raise on a certain point of the song? 

Or the volume of lead vocals to raise a little during the chorus in order to make it stand out more?

Well it's not a difficult task, let's see how to do it :)

I'm using the Cubase/Nuendo interface as an example, but the same mechanism can be applied on most of the recent DAWs.

In each channel of our virtual mixer there are (among the others) two buttons: W (Write) and R (Read): 

we can press W, then playback the song and modify in real time any parameter of our song (for example the volume fader, or the settings of some plugin, e.g. an Equalizer), then we stop the song, and disable the W button, so that only the R button is on (this button must stay always enabled, if we disable it, the channel will ignore any automation set so far); 

now if we playback the same part, we will see the parameters modify automatically exactly as we did in the "writing" mode.

This is the way to set manually in real time the automation, but we can also just write it (or modify an automation already created in real time) pressing the "+" button on the channel: 

this way we will be able to see all the settings of the channel, automated and not automated.

Using the "Pencil" tool, we can now create new automations or modify/correct the ones we've already done, by creating points and moving around the lines between these points, for example if we create a "slope" line on the "Volume" parameter, we can create a Fade Out effect. 

Practice around to discover all the various parameters you can automate!

- Addictional Awesomess: Usually on a project the tempo is set to "Fixed" (you can see it on the Transport Bar), which means that the metronome is set for just one speed for the whole project, but what happens if we want to use one single project for more than one song, just using the same channels, and the two songs uses a different tempo? 

Or what happens if we just want to throw in a tempo change inside a single song? 

How can we tell the DAW to change the metronome tempo from a certain measure on? 

Well, there is an Automation for this too :)

Click on "Fixed" to change it to "Track", and press CTRL+T to open the "Tempo Track".

This will open a timeline where, using the Pencil tool, we can create points, in order to change the tempo on a certain point of the project, so ad example, once the song 1 is finished, for example, at the measure n.200, we can change the tempo here in order to have the right click for the song 2, from the measure n.201 on. 

We can also create "ramps" of metronome, in order to give a "speeding up" or "slowing down" effect, that will obviously affect all the other plugins and virtual instruments, especially the Delay speed and the Drum Sequencers!

Another interesting feature of Steinberg products it's the "Musical Note" icon featured on Midi tracks: if it is engaged, if we change metronome, all the notes in the piano roll will be quantized according to the new tempo, if it is disengaged instead (it becomes a grey clock icon), the grid will change, but the notes will remain where they were. 

Hope this article was helpful!

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