HOW TO USE GUITAR OVERDRIVE (with Free Vst effects inside)

Hello and welcome to this week's article!
Today we're going to talk about Guitar Overdrive Stompboxes!
Overdrive is the sligh distortion effect generated, at the beginning unintentionally, from the tube amplifiers used around the fifties/sixties on a live environment: in order to produce a higher volume, they were driven at maximum, and the musicians started to notice that the sound was changing: it wasn't anymore clean and full of headroom like it used to sound at low volume, it was angrier, with more harmonic overtones, more compressed and the hot rodded tubes were producing a roar-like effect on the lower frequencies.
This effect became more and more sought after through the years, so the producers started manufactoring tools to add Saturation to the amplifiers without driving their volume to the maximum, therefore preserving the life of the Tubes;
these tools consisted basically into adding an Overdrive Channel to the amplifiers, with a higher input level and a sequence of Gain Stages in order to make te signal more and more distorted, and also in creating Overdrive Stompboxes of various kind, in order to push the level before even entering in the amplifier input.

Today Guitar Overdrive stompboxes are used basically for two reasons:

1 - To add sparkle and a little grit to a clean channel, especially by blues, jazz players and anyone who is looking for a vintage sound.

2 - To boost an already overdriven sound, in order to make a guitar solo cut more through the mix, or to play with the interaction between the overdrive and the distorted channel of the amplifier. This last method is mainly used by hard rock and heavy metal players: to get in the amplifier input with an already high level sound, but with no distortion, adds to the distorted channel of the amp a pleasant boost effect on the mid-hight frequencies, helping to achieve the "chugging" sound requested by the most modern and extreme metal genres.

Focusing on a Rock-Metal sound, the boost effect is achieved setting the overdrive with the level at maximum, the gain at zero, or anyway very low (this control is often used when trying to drive a clean channel, not when boosting an already distorted channel), and with the tone control around 12 o'clock. You can anyway cut or boost the tone setting in order to bring out more or less the mid frequencies, especially when using a strongly mid-oriented overdrive like the most famous of all stomp boxes: the Ibanez Tube Screamer.

There are many Vst simulations of guitar overdrive stomp boxes, reproducing virtually any overdrive pedal on the market, included the legendary Tube Screamer, and among those, we suggest you to try these free ones, which are impressingly good, especially when used for boosting a virtual amp:

Ignite Ts-999, based on a modded version of Ts-9

TSE 808, very realistic, now version 2.0

TS Secret, another good Tube Screamer emulator

Fretted Synth Drive Stomp, a guitar overdrive stompbox emulation


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HOW TO USE THE MIX BUSS COMPRESSION (with Free Vst Plugins Inside)

Hello and welcome to this week's article! Today we're celebrating 10'000 visits to my blog, so I've made you a small gift, by updating many articles (such as the ones for Bass, Acoustic Guitar, Vocals...) with more precise settings in terms of Compression, Equalization, Reverb and so on, in order to make them even more helpful than ever :)

Today we're going to add another chapter in the Compression-themed articles, and talk about the Buss Compression. What is it? It's a Compressor loaded on the Stereo Mix buss, with very low settings, that if used since the beginning of the mixing phase, it will help us by giving the mix a more "glued" feeling, and will also make us use lower settings on the single instruments Compressors.

We must keep in mind that sometimes an instruments, e.g. the Bass, will need to pass through many compressors: the single instrument Compressor, or maybe a Compressor and a Limiter, the Buss Compressor, the Mastering Compressor, and the Mastering Limiter, so the various compression stages will stack up and in the end it will be VERY easy to have an oversquashed final sound. On the other hand, having more compressors stacked with lower settings, will lead if set carefully to a more pleasant result, at the same final level of compression.

It's wise to dial the single instrument compressors keeping already in mind (and in our monitors) the mixing Buss compressor, so we will have an immediate feedback on their interaction, thus we will not overdo with the single compressor settings: a slighly lower dynamic range on our mix will lead to less aggressive single compression settings, thus to a more effective and balanced Mastering phase. If the sound arrives already too squashed to the Mastering phase, we need to revert to the mixing phase and fix the problem :)

So, after this important introduction, let's talk about Business: the Buss Compression takes place right at the beginning of the Mixing Phase, and immediately after the Project Preparation Phase, when we have just the levels roughly balanced and the Panning set. Now take your Mixing Stereo Buss (sometimes called Master Fader, is the fader of your DAW that sets the output level of the entire mix), set it to around -10 to -6dbs to avoid any kind of clipping and to have a not too loud final mixed track, and put on the insert a Compressor, so that every single track will pass though it having its dynamic range slighly reduced.

Set the Compressor with low settings, for example an Attack of 30ms, a Release of 100 to 300ms (or, if possible, Automatic), a 2:1 Ratio, and lower the threshold enough to make it activate but without compressing everything.

The more aggressive is the music genre you are mixing, the lower you can go with the gain reduction, for example from 2,5 to 8db of gain reduction, (4db is the perfect "work with anything setting") but bear in mind that this needs to be compensated by using less aggressive settings on the single instruments, in order to avoid ruining everything :)

It is anyway still possible to mix without Buss Compression: we can just compress the single instruments we need and leave the others (like for example the cymbals) alone and then add the final Compression in the Mastering phase: the sound will be more dynamic, but less cohesive, and it will take a hard work of fine tuning to match the result of a project that uses Buss Compression. Often you'll find that if you want to leave some dynamics on your mix it's even better not to sum up mix buss compression with the Mastering one, therefore if the sound it's too squashed, once you have mixed with a mix buss compression, just turn it off and let the mastering compression to take its place. 

Any Compressor can be used on the Mixing Buss (Multiband Compressors too, altough they are not suggested), but there are many dedicated Buss Compression plugins around nowadays, and the best ones (which are not free), such as the Waves SSL, recreates the sound of historical analog units, but there are also many Free ones, and among them, here are the best:

Density MkII

Reacomp, a great all-around compressor

Thrillseeker, a non-linear compressor

Audiocation Freeware Vst Compressor

DC1A, effortless character compressor (nice sound, and only 2 controls!)

FL4TT3RY2, soft knee Compressor

Blockfish, a very versatile Compressor

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HOW TO USE HARMONIC EXCITERS / ENHANCERS (with Free Vst plugins Inside)

Hello and welcome to this week's tutorial!
Today we're going to talk about Harmonic Exciters / Harmonic Enhancers.
First off let's explain what we are talking about: harmonics are multiples of the same frequency (x2, x3, x4...), so harmonics of 50hz are 100hz, 150hz, 200hz...
We could say that an Harmonic  Exciter is a tone shaping tool similiar to an Equalizer that adds or boost multiples of a given frequency or frequency range, in order to make it sparkle more.

Usually Harmonic  Exciters are used in the Mastering Phase, similarly and alternatively to Tape Saturation tools, in order to enhance certain frequencies, and are used mainly to excite the lower frequencies, and the highs, but sometimes are used (like the Tube Saturation plugins) on single guitars tracks or some drum part too.

Harmonic Exciters often features different bands control, in order to manually select the amount of processing to assign do the lows and to the highs separately, for example.
The best Harmonic  Exciters, such as Izotope Ozone, even lets you manually pick the frequencies to process and which band to bypass, instead of giving fixed bands.
The interesting thing about this kind of processing is that, in order to enhance the lower harmonics for example, these processors will raise their multiples even in the mids and in part of the highs; this is the main difference from a regual Equalizer, and that is why these tools are used mainly to give sparkle to certain higher frequencies, and some thump to the lows. Beware though, for it is very easy to overdo, and to have a harsh, out of control final result, a good suggestion would be to blend this effect through the Wet/Dry control.

There are different type of Harmonic Excitements, given by Tubes, by Tape, Aural Exciters (a transistor type of processing used in the mid '70s) and other types, and their result is pretty different in terms of eq.
The most important thing to remember is just to not exaggerate with the lower frequencies control, and just to give a small sparkle with the highs control, remembering also that these excitements will raise the level of the track, so compensate by lowering the Master Volume.
Sometimes there is a Bass Delay control too, which is a short Delay used to thicken the lower frequencies, but it must be used very carefully to not mess up the lower spectrum of your track, so when in doubt, avoid using it.

There are many Free Harmonic Exciters / Enhancers Vst available around, here is a selection of the most used:

Harmonic Enhancer by HgSounds

Exciter, an emulation of the Aphex Aural Exciter

X-Cita, inspired by the BBE Sonic Maximizer

Exciter, by Christian Budde

Antress Modern Exciter

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HOW TO: THE BASIC MASTERING CHAIN (free Vst Plugins included) PART 2/2

CLICK HERE TO READ PART 1/2 OF THIS TUTORIAL!

- Now it's time for a Stereo Expander (here you can find many of them for free): this is a useful tool that lets you spread the stereo image of your mix, or just some parts of it. You can choose to spread your mix as much as you want, my only suggestion is to expand only the upper frequencies of your mix leaving the lower end of your spectrum intact, in facts the lows should be as "mono" as possible, in order to stay tight and defined. Otherwise, the mix may get confused.  

- The last ring of the chain is the Limiter (there are many freeware plugins of this kind too, you can try for example this one, the Betabugs W1 Limiter), which is needed to raise the perceived volume trying to avoid distortion. The effect is called "brickwall", and it basically consist in setting a volume limit (usually -0.10 db) and raise the input gain in order to compensate the -6db of our starting mix with the desired -0.10 db of our final mastered track, so let's raise the input knob (or equivalent, according to the plugin interface), until we get to a fair amount of output volume, but not so high that we lose the dynamics of our mix: we don't want to squeeze and distort all of the surgical job done so far!! 
We can also use more than one limiter instance: the first one to raise the perceived volume, then an EQ to compensate if the limiting is taking out some lower frequencies (which may happen sometimes), and then another limiter to trim the volume, just remember that a limiter should Always be the final plugin, and the last limiter should be POST FADER (on the Cubase/Nuendo interface this means that should be placed on the last 2 slots of the effects insert).

- Once we  are satisfied of all of the processing done, it's time to Dither (Click Here to learn more), and eventually, to Remove Dc Offset. This is the final part of the mixing and mastering phase, and it's needed if you have recorded in a format superior than 16bit and 44khz (for example 24bit and 48khz); it brings your track down to 16bit and 44khz (which is the standard format for the audio cds) trying to apply as little data loss as possible. Almost every DAW has a dithering plugin bundled, but if you don't have one, here is Loser, a freeware one, and here's another, Voxengo R8brain.

- Once the track is converted in 16bit and 44khz you're ready to trim it, setting the markers at the beginning and the end of the project, set the eventual fade ins and outs, and export the WAW track, which is ready to rock!! 

So here is our chain: EQUALIZER -> (REVERB) -> (MULTIBAND COMPRESSOR) -> TAPE SATURATOR / HARMONIC EXCITER -> STEREO EXPANDER -> LIMITER -> DITHER

Keep in mind that this chain is no law, anyways, so feel free to try different combinations for the single effects, or even take some of them off the chain if you think they're unnecessary!

Troubleshooting:

- Make sure you are checking everything with METERS and Frequency Analyzers, since, especially through mastering, these tools such as the Goniometer, are important in order to avoid Phase problems. You can point out such problems and solve them also by switching your master to MONO and checking if there are any areas of the mix where some instrument gets cancelled by others.

- If you feel your sound is "oversquashed", the buss compression, summed with the other compressors you've used on your single tracks used in the mastering phase is too strong.
You can try different settings, especially on the mastering compressor, or you can even take it out completely if you think it's useless.

- Cheat: If you feel you need a litte bit more presence or loudness, keep in mind that the ear is most sensitive in the 3-4 kHz range, so use EQ to boost that range by a tiny amount, especially in quiet parts. E.G. If you boost a very small amount (0.5 db) at 3.2 Khz, you can achieve some punch to the overall mix, but be very careful, as it's easy to go from a small boost to an annoying stridency. Even 1 dB of boost may be too much.

CLICK HERE TO READ PART 1/2 OF THIS TUTORIAL!

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HOW TO USE REVERB WHEN MIXING (with free Vst Plugins Included) PART 2/2

CLICK HERE TO READ THE PART 1/2 OF THIS ARTICLE

After we've seen what is a Reverb and which are the different types of reverb available, it's time to take a look at the most common controls featured on the majority of the Vst reverbs, like the ones suggested on the First Part of our Reverb article.

There are LOTS of controls on the most recent Reverbs, allowing us to tweak any single detail of the effect, but the most important controls that will help us on our mixing phase are basically four:

- LENGHT: often called Decay, or Reverb time, or with other names, is basically the "Tail" of our effect. The longer this value is, the bigger the "room" will be, ranging from a "shower-like" ambience to a cathedral, up to the most psychedelic space effects. This will be the core control of our effect.

- PRE-DELAY: is the amount of time that will pass before the effect will be applied to the signal. I.e.: if the Pre-delay is 1 second long, the effect will begin affecting the audio track one second after it's started. This aspect is crucial to control the Transient of our sound: if the reverb start affecting a sound with a fast Transient such a Snare drum too early, it will smoothen it up and push it towards the background of the mix. Increasing the Pre-Delay value, instead, will give to the attack of our snare drum the time to leave its Transient unaffected, thus mantaining its place in the mix, and will give it a pleasant Reverb tail that will begin-some place in the middle of the wave.

- STEREO SPREAD: controls how the reverb will be reflected on our virtual room: the higher the value, the more the reverb will reflect widely on the soundstage, and it's used usually to spread the Upper-Mid frequencies. This control can be used in Mono tracks as well as in the stereo ones, just beware not to overdo with it, as it can create some weird resonance or Eq-Masking problems with the other tracks.

- EQUALIZATION - FILTERING: a solution for the above mentioned Eq-Masking problem is to Equalize the Reverb. Many producers tend to roll off or just High Pass the region from the Low Mids down, starting from around 300hz or less, to preserve headroom and avoid the Reverb Tail to mask the other instruments, since the Mid Lows, and Lows area is the "Mud Area", so the clearer the sound is, the better, unless we don't want a specifically dark sound.

Now that we have found the right setting for our Reverb (typically starting from a preset and tweaking the four basic parameters we have analyzed), we have created a "virtual room" where to put our single tracks in order to make them sound like the musicians are playing together in the same ambient. So like we've already seen on the First Part of this tutorial the idea is to create an FX track, load the Reverb there, Equalize the track, if we feel like we need it, and send it to the single instruments. Then, via the WET/DRY control of each track, we decide the amount of effect to be sent: for example, a little more on the Vocals and the Toms, a little less for the Snare, even less or none for the Guitars.

There is also a final use for our Reverb: the Mastering Reverb. This is to be used only in rare occasions, when our mix is too Dry and thin, and we need to add it a little bit of fullness or realism.  
It is used especially on electronic or pop songs, where almost every instrument is sampled, so everything may sound a little bit too artificial and harsh. The settings of the reverb should be low, the Wet/Dry ratio set low as well, and it's a good idea to add a high pass filter around 2000hz to avoid reverbering the vocals sibilance, and a low pass filter from 100hz down. Do some test bypassing the effect and turning it on again, to see if it's really useful, but be careful: it can really ruin the mix if overused!

CLICK HERE TO READ THE PART 1/2 OF THIS ARTICLE

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HOW TO USE REVERB WHEN MIXING (with free Vst Plugins Included) PART 1/2

Hello and welcome to this week's article!

Today we're going to talk about how to use Reverb when mixing!

Everybody knows what reverb is, it's the persistence of a sound that we create, as it reflects into an ambient. Fewer knows how to use it properly, as in a mix reverb is one of devil's favourite tools to create mud and make details disappear.
It could take a whole book just to describe everything about Reverb and its various uses, but today we will see only its function in the mixing phase, which is to let the single tracks to sit better in the mix and to smoothen a bit the Transient, making it a bit less "In Your Face", letting it "breathe" a little more.

First off, there are different kinds of reverb, the most importants of which are:

- Hardware Reverbs: This kind of reverb, such as Plate Reverb or Spring Reverb, was used on the early studios, and are based on the physical reflection of the signal, sent on a resonant ambient and taken back with a magnet or microphone. Today, Spring Reverb, for example, is still featured as a built-in effect on some vintage guitar amplifier, and there are many Vst emulators, such as the free Spring Reverb Type 4. A good example of Spring reverb can be found on many songs played by Jimi Hendrix.

- Studio Reverbs: Those are digital or transistor reverbs, that have been increasingly used since the mid '80, with the advent of digital rack fx processors, and are known for their cleanliness and linearity. Today studio reverbs are still used because they do not colour the original sound too much and are very versatile: they can be used with very low settings too, for example to add some depht and room even in the Mastering Phase, after the Compressors, in the mastering chain. Some good free Vst of this kind are: DxReverb Light, Magnus Ambience, Voxengo OldSkoolVerb, EpicVerb.

- Ambience Reverbs: Those are the reverbs that tries to recreate a real ambient, and are used mainly on single instruments (especially with sampled drums, or guitar Amp Simulators, DI Bass, and all those situations where you don't have a microphoned sound, so there is no natural ambience on your mix), in order to have a more cohesive sound, as if all the instruments were played in the same room. Today, ambience reverbs are often Convolution Impulse reverbs, which are reverbs based on the real response of a reverb captured by a microphone. We have already seen them applied on Guitar Amp Simulators on This Article, but impulses can be successfully used for any instruments. A great free convolution impulse reverb plugin is SIR.

The ideal use of reverb when mixing is on a Fx Track, so we can use a single reverb instance with a sound that will be coherent through all the instruments of our mix: this will have the double positive side of giving to the listener the pleasant feeling that the instruments are played live on the same room at the same time, and will reduce the CPU load, since reverbs are some of the worst "CPU hogs" among all plugins. As we've seen of the Fx Tracks dedicated article, with a reverb loaded on this track we can send the effected signal to the single tracks, as many as we want, using the same effect instance and adjusting the amount of effect to be sent to the single tracks via the WET/DRY  control of each track: this way we can decide for example to send more reverb to the Vocals track, and less to the Toms tracks, or to the Snare; 100% Wet means that the track is completely effected, while the Dry percentage is the amount of signal unaffected by the reverb.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE PART 2/2 OF THIS ARTICLE, with the explaination of how to set the Reverb controls properly!!

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HOW TO CREATE TEMPLATES FOR YOUR DAW

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE ABOUT PROJECT PREPARATION

The duty of a mix engineer is to do a better job with every single mix, improving, changing and experimenting new solutions every time, it's almost impossible to think about a perfectly stable way to work that will not be improved in the future...

...Nevertheless it's crucial, especially if we start mixing often and our schedule becomes more busy, to try to lose as less time as possible in the basic, repetitive tasks that has to be done on every mix, especially when it comes to organizing the project before starting the actual mix.

To create a template could be a time-saving idea, especially to create a complex template which already features the basic tracks organized the way we prefer, and routed on the right busses, with the basic plugins already loaded; this will help us focusing on the mixing task in a much faster and productive way.

Today most of commercial DAWs features some template with already some plugin loaded, in order to ease the workflow since the beginning (e.g. the latest versions of Cubase or Magix Samplitude lets you load a preset for a Rock project, with two guitar tracks with an amp simulator already loaded, a drum synth, a bass and a vocal track), but they are just for those who have no idea of how to begin a project from scratch, instead we need something a little more articulated and customized, so that's how we can arrange it:

1) by starting from a Minimal Project, that way we won't have to do tasks like create bunches of tracks just to get going, but we will need to decide which signal processors and instruments to add.

or 

2) Starting from a template that has everything (virtual instruments, processors, fx busses), so we can choose from a huge number of options. We can then remove anything unneeded as the song progresses, which will also lighten the Cpu load.

Now, let's think about the Track Disposition: first off let's assign to every instrument a different colour in order to spot everything at glance; a common order for the tracks is: Drums, Bass, Guitars, Extra Instruments (such as Synths), Vocals. Name every track properly, for example "Rhythm Guitar Left", and so on, and if you feel you need it, you can also route some of these tracks on Group Tracks and FX busses.

Once we have loaded all the tracks we need, it's time for the last step: the Window Layouts. Almost all programs make it easy to create an arrangement of windows, then save that as a layout. This is particularly helpful with single-monitor setups, where it's impossible to put all the windows you want on screen at one time, thereby requiring some degree of “window-flipping”.

Creating the right layout is helpful especially in the mixing phase: when editing midi or recording  instruments, in facts, we need specific windows made for the task.

When mixing, instead, we can arrange a layout that incorporates on the same window the tracks and the mixer, which is crucial on the balancing phase, and very handy when it comes to loading-bypassing-editing effects. Once we have our layout on an optimal configuration, finally, it's time to save the project before importing and recording any track, in order to load it every time and spare ourself the loss of time of organizing the project, and to find a familiar layout that will make our workflow faster.

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