Blue Cat, the spacemaker!

PipelineAudio wrote on 11/27/2005, 11:15 AM
Grab the free version of Blue Cat's Digital Peak Meter here

http://software.bluecatonline.org/DPeakMeter.htm

Heres a happy helpful trick to make more space and realism, at the same time adding more impact and "thereness" to the mix as a whole. Especially if you are triggereing a snare sound this can be a way to fudge reality a bit.

1. Gate your snare track, but make sure its alive for a bit. Hold about 75msec and decay 250 ms should be around right

2. Put the Blue Cat peak Meter on your snare track, enable fx automation for the meter

3. Play the track from start to finsih, observing blue cat drawing its meter envelope on the snare track, then disable the automation of the Blue Cat meter

4. Make a copy of your overhead track(s). Set a compressor on it for about 0 msec attack, 75 msec release to start with. 6:1 ratio. Eq most of the bottom out of this track and hype the highs a little bit.

5. Send the overhead copy track to a reverb, with a predelay of around 50 msec

6. Now, using the envelope edit tool, copy the Blue Cat Meter created envelope from the snare track, and paste it onto the overheads, maybe 20 to 60 msec ahead of the time it started on the snare track, youll adjust this to taste later.

7. Ensure that the new envelope on the overhead track is a volume envelope

8. Now play the tracks and adjust the release on the overhead compressor till you get a nice "breath of sizzle" everytime the snare hits

9. You can go from a very agressive snare sound with lots of sizzle to a really nice open snare, with a lot of breathing room, depending on how you eq and compress

Comments

kbruff wrote on 11/28/2005, 10:15 AM
That is a great post!!!

I have a quick question for you -- is there a pluggin which could essentially be used to drive the panning and volume envelopes of various audio tracks all within one session. Therefore a backup of the session would not only have the audio but a cross platform pluggin which could recall how to re-apply different panning schemes?

Thanks,
Kevin
PipelineAudio wrote on 11/28/2005, 1:04 PM
Hopefully someone will chime in, but I can't think of how. Maybe the guys in the scripting forum?