Filling the gap- community mixing/mastering fx project(s)?
Posted: Tue Apr 05, 2016 11:34 am
Branching off from a discussion in Spogg's Flowstone music thread so as not to derail...
I would first like to mention that I mean no disrespect to existing products, such as the awesome Variety of Sound stuff, but there are still a few gaps to be filled, and, well, variety never hurts either, eh?
So, this is an attempt to see what we (as individuals or a community) might be able to do to increase the number of quality mixing and mastering tools built with FlowStone, for the good of the FS community and the world! Or something like that...
For my part: know a lot of theory, but am still in the process of learning the necessary DSP for such tasks. Right now I'm concentrating on this "circuit-modelling" stuff, specifically filters, largely because I'm pretty familiar with the analog counterparts. I have built a lot of stuff from others' components in SynthEdit and other similar packages, so I'm pretty familiar with the "visual programming" paradigm and how a lot of stuff is made... but I couldn't make anything at the level of the VoS stuff at this point, for example.
Some general thoughts on the subject (none of these are new ideas, just sharing my perspective):
- I think the "analog magic" so many people talk about is largely hype. There is no denying that certain analog devices sound great, but if you study these things, it's pretty much down to two things: distortion and noise (often subtle, but still). The VoS blog actually has some great articles on this, and if you look around you can find more (I can rustle up some links if anyone's interested).
- Along those same lines, I learned in my analog EQ experiments that a lot of the magic there is down to the shape of the curve (this is something I've seen discussed elsewhere too, can't recall where offhand though). My DSP experiments so far (and info all over the net) have shown me that this can be tricky in certain situations, but apparently there are ways to cope.
- I think tubes are overrated (not that they're bad, mind you), but apparently putting them on your GUI and making them glow brighter as you increase the gain (or similar parameter) makes your plugin sound 31% warmer.
Anyway, it's very late here and I may be rambling. So, anyone else interested in getting involved?
I would first like to mention that I mean no disrespect to existing products, such as the awesome Variety of Sound stuff, but there are still a few gaps to be filled, and, well, variety never hurts either, eh?
So, this is an attempt to see what we (as individuals or a community) might be able to do to increase the number of quality mixing and mastering tools built with FlowStone, for the good of the FS community and the world! Or something like that...
For my part: know a lot of theory, but am still in the process of learning the necessary DSP for such tasks. Right now I'm concentrating on this "circuit-modelling" stuff, specifically filters, largely because I'm pretty familiar with the analog counterparts. I have built a lot of stuff from others' components in SynthEdit and other similar packages, so I'm pretty familiar with the "visual programming" paradigm and how a lot of stuff is made... but I couldn't make anything at the level of the VoS stuff at this point, for example.
Some general thoughts on the subject (none of these are new ideas, just sharing my perspective):
- I think the "analog magic" so many people talk about is largely hype. There is no denying that certain analog devices sound great, but if you study these things, it's pretty much down to two things: distortion and noise (often subtle, but still). The VoS blog actually has some great articles on this, and if you look around you can find more (I can rustle up some links if anyone's interested).
- Along those same lines, I learned in my analog EQ experiments that a lot of the magic there is down to the shape of the curve (this is something I've seen discussed elsewhere too, can't recall where offhand though). My DSP experiments so far (and info all over the net) have shown me that this can be tricky in certain situations, but apparently there are ways to cope.
- I think tubes are overrated (not that they're bad, mind you), but apparently putting them on your GUI and making them glow brighter as you increase the gain (or similar parameter) makes your plugin sound 31% warmer.
Anyway, it's very late here and I may be rambling. So, anyone else interested in getting involved?