The focus of our mix part 2

 

Hello and welcome to this week's article!

Today we're going to elaborate more on a topic we have already started talking about here: The Focus of our mix!

Let's start by saying that if we have applied the 5 rules of the first article we will already know what is the focus of our mix, whether it's the vocals, the drums, the guitars, the synths etc... 

Once we have a mix that satisfies us we need to make 2 more trials to check the balance of our mix:

1) Check the mix in mono: maybe the mix sounds incredibly well in your 1000 bucks monitors and headphones, but you need to imagine that roughly half of the listeners will listen to it in less than ideal conditions, like from the mono speaker of the phone, and you need to be ready to spot all the possible problems (for example something hard panned that disappears or that makes some weird interaction with the other instruments or loses balance.

2) Check the mix at minimum volume: now it's the time of the trial by fire, we need to listen to the mix with the volume at the minimum, when it's barely understandable. 

What are the instruments that stand out the most? Are they the ones that we expected? If they are not, we need to eq the things we want in spotlight better, moving them towards the most audible frequency area (2khz to 5khz) and carving space in the other instruments.
I remember in the past I have listened to some death metal song that at normal volume was sounding decent, then lowering the volume we realized that basically only the kick remained audible, so the sound guy had to rebalance things a bit, and this way he freed up a lot of headroom for the other instruments without sacrificing too much the perceived kick volume at normal levels.

3) Once the focus of your mix is established, work your way backwards: once you have clear where you want the attention of your listener to go, you need to put the chosen instrument under the spotlight, and make room both in terms of volume and eq through the other ones, according to your priority list; don't let the audience focus on a useless cowbell while in the background the singer is singing the most beautiful melody of all times!

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Review: Engl Savage 120

 

Hello and welcome to this week's article!

Today we are reviewing a monster of an amp, 120w of tube power, which is considered the most representative of the German brand Engl: the Savage 120!

This head came out originally in 1993, a time in which digital amps were basically useless toys, and in which if you wanted a no-compromise guitar tone you had to really go for the real thing: a super large, super heavy (22kg!) rock amplifier, with a lot of tubes (even in the fx loop) and volume, and if you wanted to reach the perfect tone you had to crank it to the point of being almost unusable.

The Engl Savage is a head that embodies well the attitude of the brand: high priced amps, hand made in Germany, which provides impressive solidity, reliability and mids capable of cutting through the most dense mix: usually if in a concert only one of the 2 guitarists has an Engl amp, the other one gets completely covered.

The Savage offered back then features that were not common (and still today are not), making it a very complete, full optional amp: 2 fx loops, 2 master volumes, 4 channels, and a ton of knobs and switches to craft your tone in a very detailed way.

How does it sound? As I was mentioning, it has a very distinctive mid range which is very cutting, but it features also a lot of flexibility; as a reference, think about a Marshall as an amp with prominent mid highs, while the Engl is an amp with its distinctive tone a bit more in the mid range, slightly more nasal and with a ton of additional gain.

Compared to other popular heads of the brand, for example the Powerball, which came out almost 10 years later, the Savage sounds more classic and in your face (more punchy, like a Marshall JM800 compared to a DSL or a TSL, which sound more modern), a bit less scratchy and slightly more nasal, while the Powerball is a little bit more modern, but both heads retain the undeniable Engl character, which I really love.

Today this amp is sold in its Mark II version, which comes in 60w and 120w and features a serie of extra optionals (noise gate, MIDI switching) and tweaks in terms of tone, which doesn't modify too much the soul of this head.

Thumbs up!

Specs for the Mark II version, the one currently sold:

- 4 Channels: Clean, Crunch I, Crunch II, Lead

- Power: 120 W

- Preamplifier tubes: 6x Engl ECC83 / 12AX7

- Power amp tubes: 2x Engl 6550

- 2 Tube-driven FX loops with separate balance controls

- Noise Gate with adjustable threshold (footswitchable)

- MIDI Channel Assignment and Controller Enable Switch - Write / Copy (for MIDI programming)

- Sound Switching options: Input Lo / Hi, Bright, Preshape, Contour (Clean, Crunch I), Mid Le./Bo., Depth Boost, Gain Lo / Hi, Contour (Crunch II, Lead), Rough / Smooth

- Controls: Gain (separate for each channel), Bass, Mid Lean, Mid Bold, Treble (Clean, Crunch I), Bass, Middle, Treble, Tone Balance (Crunch II, Lead), Volume (separate for each channel), Presence A, Presence B, Master A, Master B

- Controls (rear side): Noise Gate Threshold Level, FX Loop I Balance, FX Loop II Balance

- Outputs: 1 x 4 Ohm, 2 x 8 Ohm, 2 x 16 Ohm, 1 x 16 Ohm

- Made in Germany

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Visual references when mastering

 

Hello and welcome to this week's article!

Today we're going to talk about a topic that ties together our mastering article and the one about frequency analyzers: how to use visual references to help us when mastering!

The first tool I want to talk about is Izotope Tonal Balance Control, a tool that is available for separate purchase and that is also included in other Izotope bundles, which is very simple: they have analyzed thousands of record, divided by genre, and have found the average eq curve of the tunes, so you can compare your master to this average to see where you're at: does your master need more low end? Less? Does it need more air? 

This product is as simple as brilliant, and probably is the most useful mastering tool that came out in the recent years, because sometimes your room is not treated, or your monitors or headphones are not the best, and certain areas of your mix can go unnoticed: this way you can easily find where there is too much (or too little) energy compared with the average of the other commercial recordings, and it's a great starting point also just to go back to our mix project and correct there.

The second one, for much more precise adjustments, is Voxengo Span, a free plugin (click here to download it): with this frequency analyzer not only you can see in great detail the analysis of your spectrum, but you can zoom to the extreme, and this is interesting because it's like looking at our mix with a magnifying glass: if we want we can easily go resonance hunting and with an eq lower, surgically, all the parts in which there is an accumulation of energy (for example too many instruments in the same frequency area, which produce a spike in volume), this way we can mix some of those instruments differently, or lower with an eq these spikes: in any case the aim is to free headroom without harming the mix, cleaning up the troublesome areas so that this way we will have more room to push our master, and have all the available volume in the areas we want.

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Review: Audiority Dr Drive

 

Hello and welcome to this week's article!

Today we are going to review a new free Vst plugin, an overdrive by Audiority: the Dr Drive!

This overdrive is modeled after the Horizon Devices Precision Drive, a modified version of the classic Tube Screamer designed by Misha Mansoor of Periphery, which includes 4 knobs (plus the gate switch, which is in a separate part of the GUI):

- Level (which is similar to the Tube Screamer one, except for the fact that the 6 in this corresponds to the 10 in the TS, so use it very carefully),

- Drive, which not too different from the TS one, very usable (I have used this plugin mainly as a booster, though)

- Attack, which determines where is set the attack when picking, from somewhere in the lower mids to the ear piercing highs area, and it's useful especially when creating modern tones,

- Bright, which is basically a tone knob, but tuned a bit more towards the high end, therefore conservative settings are suggested,

- Gate: an intelligent noise gate that basically removes the need of adding a separate gate plugin to our guitar chain, thus saving CPU

What can I say? Since I have tried this plugin, it has become my go-to overdrive for all projects, because it sounds great, it has an integrated noise gate and it gives even more tone shaping tools than the classic Tube Screamer, so I really suggest all of our readers to download this plugin and try it out, it might become your ultimate overdrive plugin for a long time.

Thumbs up!

Specs taken fromthe website: 


- Analog Modelled Overdrive

- Drive, Tone, Attack and Level controls

- Pre and Post effect gain

- Mix control

- Noise Gate

- Resizable interface

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