Mixing and Mastering with a Peak Limiter (with Free Vst Plugins)

Hello and welcome to this week's article!

Today we are talking about a very interesting tool to compress or limit a sound (under this point of view this article goes under the main category of COMPRESSORS) slighly different from the compressors and limiters interface of today.

In the old times (we are talking of the '60s), gain reduction was not a trend as today: sounds were much less "in your face", recordings were less loud and there was a lot of headroom and dynamic range (on the other hand songs were much less powerful and many nuances were hard to hear because they were really low in volume).

In the early '60s a producer called Teletronix created one of the most famous compressors of the time, the LA-2A Leveling Amplifier, a tube-driven peak limiter which still today is used by some classic studio due to its simplicity and the very particular harmonic enhancement produced.

In 1968, then, a producer called Urei created a peak limiter that still today is considered by many studios a standard, and it is still in production: the 1176Ln Peak Limiter, one of the first compressors / peak limiters (at the time the concept of compressor and limiter was really the same) to be completely solid state, unlike the other models which all were tube-driven.

In the modern times Compressors and Limiters have taken different roads, specializing in different tasks and different phases of the music production, but the origin of both is the Peak Limiter, a tool that originally had just two knobs: Peak Reduction and Gain (or Input and Output).

Peak reduction controls the amount of compression to apply to the signal (as can be seen also from the VU meter), Gain controls the output volume. That's it.

Obviously with the following releases of the 1176, the unit started having more and more controls, to the point that today is very similar to a modern compressor: you can choose the compression ratio among four modes (or press all the buttons together to drive the ratio to the max), you can decide attack and release with two knobs and there are different ways of using the VU Meter. 

HOW TO USE TODAY A PEAK LIMITER:

Mixing:  There are many uses of a compressor (both physical or one of the countless VST versions, such as the freeware Modern Lost Angel or Modern Seventh Sign by Antress, or the Variety of Sound Thrillseeker, or Nomad Factory Bus Driver), but today this kind of units are used mainly for Buss Compression.

A typical use of a Peak Limiter is on the Drum Overhead Buss: usually the snare is the loudest drum part picked up by the oh microphones, therefore putting a peak limiter in the OH buss lets us compress the snare sound and raise and make stable the level of the cymbals: this way the cymbals will be more audible and with less dynamic range, and at the same time the snare will pop out less but it will gain in weight and sustain.
The only thing to remember is to balance the output of the signal, because since we are adding db of gain IN, we should lower accordingly of the same amount of db the OUTPUT in order to leave the overall level of the track unaltered, just processed.

A peak limiter is also good on single tracks such as Bass or Vocals, adding weight and loudness, if we want to use compression as a tone shaping tool, since this obviously is not the most transparent way of processing our track. 

One last great way to use a peak limiter is for parallel compression: this way we can really squeeze a buss with all the drum parts, and then mix this sound back into the unprocessed sound, until we find the desired mix between the two.

Mastering: There are some mastering engineers who prefers the subtlety of a multiband compressor in the mastering buss, in order to be able to tame selectively certain frequences and to make adjustments even in the mastering phase, and some other engineers who prefer to have all the mix equilibrium perfect, and then slam the track with a broadband compressor, leveling equally all frequences (I often prefer this solution, and if there is some frequency that needs to be tamed, I prefer going back to the mixing project and solve the problem from there). With the hardware version obviously the hardware needs to be stereo, otherwise two units are needed, anyway this kind of peak limiter is very good in mastering, because often the harmonic excitement and the warmth that it adds to the song is just what it takes to bring a recording to the next level.

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Interview: Mercuriall Audio

Mercuriall Audio is an interesting audio company from Russia, founded by the programmer Vladimir Titov and mix engineer Vjacheslav Tikhonov in 2015.

The company has started releasing some free plugin (that still today can be downloaded via their website), before making the leap into the realm of paid Vst Plugins, with their first paid creations, Amp One, a virtual amplifier for Ipad, and Tube Amp Ultra 530, a vst that simulates an Engl E530 Preamp (Click Here for our Review). 

Here is our interview:

GuitarNerdingBlog: Hello and welcome to Guitar Nerding Blog! Can you give us some details on how Mercuriall audio was born?

Mercuriall: Hello Atoragon and everybody who reads Guitar Nerding Blog! About 5 years ago I first tried to make a convolution reverb algorithm, starting from a simple (and very slow) method. 

And for my first program - guitar cabinet emulator Cab 1.0. I was looking for a simple name little in common with the cosmic theme. But that was not a real "birth" of the projectm it was a project that I was doing as a hobby in my spare time. 

At that moment, I experimented on modeling guitar cabinets for Free amp-sims. The real birth of Mercuriall can be considered the moment in which I created the preamp-sim JCM800. It happened when I was not working, therefore I was completely focused on modeling guitar cabinets and preamps. It was a very difficult time for me as I was working on free software and did not have sources of funding within six months. Then I started working on Amp ONE for the iPad, which took me about a year. After the release of Amp ONE, it only slightly eased my financial situation. Tube Amp Ultra 530 came about a year after the release of Amp ONE. U530 became my first commercial software for desktop computers. A more logical to assume that the release of U530 and the launch of the website Mercuriall.com is the official birth of Mercuriall Audio Software. In the beginning, I did not imagine that it would have been so difficult, because since the beginning of the work on the Amp ONE and before the U530 it took about two and a half years during which I had no funding and I worked completely alone at my own risk. It was a difficult time, which I would not like to repeat. Perhaps the birth of something wonderful always happens in terrible agony. In this case, it happened to delight fans of high-quality tube amplifiers modeling.
If to be completely honest, I haven't worked on the U530 alone. I entrusted the work on the circuits of E530 and GUI for new plugin to one of the Amp ONE beta testers. He as well as I plays guitar but also understands the circuitry better than I do. I needed someone who is willing to experiment with the circuits of the analog prototype, someone who can rewire or make measurements in the right places of circuits, to find places where there is a differences between an analog device and simulation. Together we succeeded to finalize the U530. Therefore Mercuriall Audio Software - more than one person, it's a small team.

GNB: What do you think about the amplification business nowadays?

M: Honestly, I cannot say something very specific about today’s amplification business, as it is hard to make comparisons with the past. I think it is a very exciting time now, as the processing capabilities of modern computers allow us to do much more than it was possible before, and it is not only because of the hardware engineers’ achievements, but also because of programmers, who have learned to use hardware at its full potential.
At the same time, many large companies who create software for guitar players had too much focus on the number of simulated amplifiers and pedals, sacrificing the quality. Now they cannot move away from this path to create new products with just a few devices, but of the highest quality of simulation. They are forced to use marketing and redesign tactics to stay in the business.
This gives room to startups who focus on the most accurate modeling of amps and pedals. At the moment, all the necessary theoretical materials are available through the internet. Learn and create!

GNB: What is the design of a Mercuriall audio plugin usually like?

M: Previous free plugins were mostly experimental. I tried different approaches to achieve specific goals.
For example, working on U530 consisted of several stages.
Since we were modeling a tube preamp, the first thing we did was to compile the scheme of the device in LTSpice IV simulator and test its operation in comparison to the actual device.
At the next stage I moved the LTSpice-model directly to the code in C ++, so that the program could perform the simulation – but not in real-time, as the simulation algorithm requires complex calculations for solving systems of nonlinear differential equations. At this point, I ran the simulation and generated a response to a given stimulus to get the teaching sample set to train the neural network, which will replace the individual algorithm for solving nonlinear differential equations and will significantly accelerate the simulation of the circuit.
In parallel, we worked on the user interface of the program in the Blender 3D.
Afterwards, everything is put together, tested, adjusted and finalized.
The longest and hardest part is working on the visual appearance of the program.

GNB: What is your opinion about the world of amp/cabinet simulators nowadays? Do you think eventually they will replace entirely the classic hardware?

M: Entirely – they will never be replaced, of course. We can draw an analogy between real and electronic books. Traditional books are still popular despite the fact that we have an opportunity to read them electronically. I think the main point here is that it is important for people to have something that is less dependent on “time” and that can be considered as a reference that is the base for the progress. Nevertheless, most will use the amp/cab-sims because it is more convenient.

GNB: What is the philosophy behind your software: analog modeling, black box approach or else?

M: I think all amp-sim developers use the principle of the black box. If you put a device with full analogue modeling (e.g. LTSpice IV) one the left side and on the right a device based fully on the black box principle (Kemper), then the majority of those will be somewhere closer to the black box. Our approach is very close to the version with full analogue modeling (LTSpice IV), because it uses the same methods for the simulation of the analog circuit as it happens in the simulation in LTSpice. The difference is that to speed up the calculations, some of them are «simulated" by the neural network, which essentially can be considered a black box algorithm integrated into the analog circuit simulation.

GNB: What are your career highlights as a software house?

M: (This is probably a long story) I first started to get acquainted with programming in 1994, when I was a schoolboy studying in the 8th grade, and studied at the courses Programming in Microsoft FoxPro for DOS. Then I did not have a computer and it was interesting and mysterious. 

I got a PC one year later, and three months after its appearance I had a software package Symantec Zortech C ++ 3.0. At that time it was the best compiler C/C ++ for DOS / Windows 3.11, and I started to learn C/C ++. Then I was in the 9th grade of high school. 

The problem was that I was not understanding what I do, and what I wanted to get from it. 

Back in '94 on the computer courses they showed us how to work with spreadsheets. I was amazed that you can enter a mathematical expression into a table cell, and instantly receive the calculation result, without compiling any of the code. 

I became interested in it and look how that information can be programmed. As a result, I found the book describes the basic operation of BASIC interpreter in C. And I had the idea to create a shell of their language, similar to Pascal to take part in the competition program in the 11th grade. At the competition, I won a thick book Internet Explorer 3.0 and a box of floppy and mouse pad. This is how my passion for programming started. My project has not received further development, but this was the first experience of creating programs with more than two thousand lines of code. While studying at the University I got interested in the modeling of neural networks, but since in the curriculum we did not have anything connected with the study of neural networks, it was mostly searching and reading on the subject material from the Internet. 

After the graduation, I have worked as a teacher of computer science, but the lack of prospect forced me to look for something else.  

I have worked for 6 months as a programmer in the Kamchatka center of communication and monitoring: there I was programming in Perl and Delphi (Pascal). From there I went to the company that provides access to the Internet (the company - provider of the Internet) where in addition to Perl, I had to write programs in PHP, PL / SQL (Oracle). There I was again faced with a C when it was necessary to modify the source code for Sendmail and Cyrrus. So once again I began to write code in C. Next came Mercuriall Cab 1.0 for the first time I took off impulses from my own cab and tried to apply machine learning to get orthogonal series Volterra instead of the usual IRs. And when the need for a programmer disappeared and I got fired, I became more focused to lead the development. The first amp which appeared after my dismissal was JCM800 that was absolutely free. Then came JCM800 Hot (JCM800 modified scheme), Harlequin. Then came the same plug-ins but with improved performance and accuracy of the modeling. Donations received was very small, but I was able to save enough money to buy iPad Air, and start developing a program Amp ONE for the iPad. It's the main stages at the moment.

GNB: How do you think the future of digital amp simulation will be? Will it be still for years a continuous modeling of old hardware or do you think someday the concept itself of amplification will change, along with the tastes of musicians?

M: Hard to predict. I think that the success of the accurate modeling of guitar amps will first lead to users wanting to get back to the origins of the guitar sound. Perhaps there will be experiments to obtain new sounds with the desired characteristics, but models of transistors/pentodes/transformers - these will remain as close to the originals as possible. Thus, the sound search will be carried out by changing the scheme of "virtual" amplifiers, and if desired, it will be possible to re-create the same amplifier in the analog world. In principle, this is how modern amplifiers are created - starting with the device’s circuit in the emulator of electric circuitries. At the same time, trying to match the sound to the “industry standards” of Clean, Crunch and Lead.

GNB: Do you have any tip or suggestion on how to use your plugins? Or some setting you prefer?

M: At the moment, I use default controls of the Free-version of U530. The reason is that I do not deal with professional mastering and mixing, and for playing in headphones, such settings are just enough.

GNB: Thank you for the interview, you can conclude by saying to our readers anything you want!

M: I want to thank all those who believe in us. We will continue creating wonderful things for you all. We have big plans for 2016. We will continue to work on the precise modeling of amplifiers. And right now we are working on our new project - Spark!

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Guitar and bass Inlay dots! What are those?

Hello everyone and welcome to this week's article! today we're taking a look at those small white dots (or other shapes) that we find often on the fretboard of  our guitars and basses, the inlays!

Inlay dots are small pieces of a material that may vary (from plastic to abalone to pearl) that gets installed in a guitar or bass fretboard in order to help the player finding the right fret to press: the use is therefore both for learning and for aesthetic purpose.

Inlay dots may come in the most various shapes and sizes: from the circular ones, which are by far the most common, to the "sharkfin" type, from the trapeze shaped ones to more creative shapes like the classic "birds" of the PRS guitars.

Inlay dots can be set in the part of the fretboard where the player puts his fingers and/or on the side of it, so that only the player can see them.

A luthier, in order to install the inlay dots on a fretboard, needs to carve the shape into the fretboard, glue the inlay into the hole, and once the inlay is perfectly fixed, to smooth out the whole fretboard until you can't feel any step between the fretboard and the inlay. It must feel like part of the fretboard in a perfect continuity.

Usually inlays are set in a classic scheme, in order to make the player to know where the octave ends and the new one starts: single inlays on the 3rd, 5th, 7th, 9th, double inlays on the 12th, single inlays on the 15th, 17th, 19th, and 21st, and if present, double inlays on the 24th. 

Advantages of such scheme include its symmetry about the 12th fret and symmetry of every half (0-12 and 12-24) about the 7th and 19th frets. Anyway sometimes there are also less classic and more creative patterns.

An interesting new way of using inlay dots has risen to success in the last decade by some famous guitar player (like Herman Li of Dragonforce and Devin Townsend): to wire the inlay dots with leds or optic fiber (passing through a canal inside the fretboard), in order to make them light in the dark of the stage, for both show and playing purpose.

There are also fluorescent inlays that glows in the dark without the need of a battery, but obviously the light produced is much inferior.

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Interview: Accusonus

Accusonus is one of the  most interesting realities in music production software: they try to differentiate themselves from the other software houses by creating new tools to craft a sound, instead of proposing their version of something that was already there by decades.
Here's a chat about their vision of the music productin software:


GuitarNerdingBlog: Hello and welcome to Guitar Nerding Blog! Can you give us some details on how Accusonus was born?

Accusonus: Thanks for having us and congrats for your blog! Accusonus was founded back in 2012, from Elias Kokkinis and myself. Previously we were both working in the academia, doing research in audio signal processing. However, our dream was always to use our research background in order to build innovative products that will revolutionarize the pro-audio workflow. At the time, we were amateur musicians/sound engineers ourselves and I remember us having long discussions on how much we felt that the pro-audio industry was stagnated compared to other industries. We have more processing power in our pockets than the computers of the best professional recording studio in the 90s had: shouldn't we use this power to build something new? I guess that accusonus is our answer to this observation.

GNB: Do you think the Midi/samples world has reached a level of realism good enough or are we still going to have to rely on acoustic drums for long? Or is there a third way?

A: I think that drum samples are already very realistic. Some people might argue that they can be compared to a good drummer. My guess is that even if these people are right, the producer will have to spend countless hours on programming in order to give them a human touch. And even if she/he achieves the perfect result, there's still the problem that everyone uses the same libraries making every production sound the same. So my tip is use drum samples for your quick demos, but get a real drummer if you want to create great music or have fun with your band! Don't underestimate the human element in music. Music is all about emotions and despite the progress of AI, the computers don't have emotions now or in the foreseeable future. At the end of the rehearsal, you cannot grab a beer with your computer, can you?

GNB: What is the concept behind an Accusonus plugin usually like? And what about its design?

A: Our internal rule is that every accusonus product should do something that no existing product does. We are not interested in doing me-too products, simply because we find them boring. As for the design of our plugins: it's an iterative process, where we try to improve the user experience of our customers giving them the means to do their job easier and faster.

GNB: What is your opinion about the world of home recording and professional recording of today?

A: In the last decade, the home recording studio has been seriously upgraded since there's access to cheaper and better hardware and software. However, I think that there will be always a need for professional studios (at least for some people) for (i) the acoustics of the recording space and (ii) the need for the professional process. Think it this way: I can definitely do my job from home but I go everyday to the office to meet my colleagues and co-operate with them in a professional environment. Sometimes the professional studio is needed, because it's the office of musicians/engineers.

GNB: What is the philosophy behind your software?

A: In accusonus, we build Artificial Intelligence tools (drumatom is one of them)! But we want our AI to improve the workflow of musicians/engineers and not to replace them. Let's face it: the best element in music is fun and we want to keep it this way. So we want to use novel technology to revolutionarize the pro-audio industry without taking the fun element out of the music making process!

GNB: What are your career highlights as a software house?

A: We are only 3.5 years old, so my answer is that hopefully our career highlights are not here yet! That being said, whenever a professional around the world send us an email/tweet/facebook post that our software has saved her/his mix, we feel we have a new career highlight.

GNB: How do you think the future of mix engineering will be? Will it be still for years a continuous modeling of old hardware or do you think someday the concept itself of recording and amplifying will change, along with the tastes of musicians?

A: We have a very strong and clear vision for the future of the pro-audio industry and we are working to make it true. I cannot say much at this time, but right now 50% of our team is working in crazy research projects and you should expect to see the results in the next months/years!

GNB: Do you have any tip or suggestion on how to use your plugins? Or some setting you prefer?

A: My only general guidelines are: (1) experiment with our tools as much as you can and (2) trust your ears. For specific tips/sugested workflows, I would encourage everyone to subscribe to our newsletter: http://accusonus.com/company/newsletter and youtube channel



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How to use Two Heads with One Cab (2 amps - 1 cabinet, a guide for dummies)

Hello and welcome to this week's article! 

Today we're going to talk about how to connect two amps in the same cabinet.

First of all why would someone want to do it?

The reason is to have two totally different sounds: for example to have the clean channel of a Fender amp and the overdrive channel of a Marshall, or (and this problem is particularly felt by those who have a single channel head) to use different settings from two identical heads.

The problem of connecting two different heads into a same cabinet was particularly strong in the 80s, a time in which technology wasn't as flexible as today in allowing the players to find their tone easily, therefore to have a quality tone it was mandatory to use a big tube amp, and sometimes the most demanding players wanted (and still today wants) to use different tones from different amps in the same song.

There are many ways to connect two amps to the same cabinet, some more elaburated and some less, and remember that some method that you can find online can actually damage your cabinet or the poweramp of your head, so we will analyze today only the two most popular and straightforward ones:

- By using a stereo cabinet: stereo cabs has two separate inputs that for example (in the case of a 4x12 cab) drives 2 speakers each. You can connect one head to one of the stereo inputs and another one to the other (being very careful of the ohm impedence and of the maximum watt load that can be absorbed by the speakers) and plugging the guitar into an a/b switch that goes into the inputs of the 2 amps, so you can decide with it which amp to use.

- By using a tool made for the task, for example a Radial Headbone: with this box (there are various versions, according if you're using solid state or tube amps) we can plug the amps and the guitar directly to the box, and it can safely handle the power amp loads, and switch between the heads, going from its output into the cabinet. This solution (unlike the other one) will let us to use all the speakers in the cabinet, instead of just half of them.


Do you know any other safe and effective way to use multiple amps in the same cabinet? lLet us know in the comment section!


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Review: Accusonus Drumatom 2

Hello and welcome to this week's article!
Today we're going to review a very interesting piece of software, which can help a mix engineer solving some a recording problem which is almost impossible to avoid completely:  the bleed of the various parts of the drumset in the microphones that captures the single drum parts.

Let's start by saying this: to get a clear drum track, the ideal would be when recording to have the single parts with isolated sounds (or minimum spill), to be able to process them individually without processing the "bleed" and then add thickness and depth with the overhead microphones and/or the room mike.
In order to cut away the unwanted bleed from the tracks, so far mix engineers have relied on gates, a tool that lowers to zero all the signal below a certain threshold, leaving just the audio peaks higher than that.
The use of a gate has some intrinsic problem: for example if you are playing a heavyle gated snare, if the drummer plays a press roll part or a ghost note, it will probably be gated, plus an excessively strong use of gate can make the drum to sound too artificial, by eating away frequences and resonances even from the part of the sound left.

Drumatom is a software that tries to change the way mix engineers process their drum tracks, by eliminating the bleed of the other drum parts without any sensible detriment to the main sound, and letting you reintroduce part of what has been eliminated, giving you the opportunity to choose its amount, leaving the track clean but more natural sounding compared to using a traditional gate.

The way it works it's pretty simple: you import the drum tracks (or part of tracks, if the track is too long it's better to divide it to make it easier to process) and once Drumatom has analyzed all the tracks you just have to tell it what part of the drumset it is (e.g. snare, kick...) and from there you have only 3 controls:

- Focus: to decide how much of the spill to remove

- Fine Tune: to choose how much of the spill to reintroduce

- A/B: to compare the processed track with the original version.

Once you have processed all the tracks you need you can export them back to a folder to use on your Daw, or, using the plugin Drumatom Player (sold separately) you can route the tracks directly inside your Daw.

This is a very interesting piece of software that can really change the way mix engineers can work acoustic drum tracks, the only thing we can expect with the future releases is real time processing, and the possibility of doing everything from inside the Daw without having to pass from an external program (Drumatom), using another one inside the Daw to link it (Drumatom Player): I'm sure we'll get there very soon.

You can check out an interesting video on how this software work taken from the official Accusonus Youtube Channel:

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How to use Bass Drops in rock / metal music (a guide for dummies)

Hello everyone!
Today we are taking a look at an interesting trick, especially used by nu metal and metalcore bands to enhance the strenght of a particular moment (e.g. a breakdown part), by adding artificially a shot of bass frequences that quickly fades out, usually with a downward pitch bend.

How do they do that? Not with the bass, the bass drop is one or more octaves lower than a real bass, and it's made to not be noticed alone (unless you have a trained ear) but to enhance the impact of the other instruments in the breakdown part.
A bass drop can be noticed especially with a subwoofer or with headphones that reproduces well the lower area, while with other sources, sometimes it is almost inaudible.

A bass drop is a synth note, on a very low octave and with the same key of the riff, added to add punch to a single hit,
Where do you find these shots to apply to your song?

- There are packs with several bass drops, already made in different keys, that you just add on a new track to your song at the exact moment (but don't overdo, or it may become a bit annoying!): some of them are for free, some are paid.

- Some producer also uses orchestral parts, (like floor tom, or a bass drum) of a virtual instrument, and drops it down one or more octave, adjusting the key, to add more drama to an orchestral part, especially if applied to a metal song, like in this one, at min. 1.41:

(in this case the bass drum was added in the mastering phase, adding also a sidechain compression to give even more the "pump effect"!).

- There is also a third way: to create a bass drop yourself: you need a synth or a sound generator: generate a sound for 4 seconds, then add a pitch bend to make it go down of an octave during this 4 seconds, some fade out, and then just adjust note and octave until you reach your goal: a quick and nice tutorial can be seen here:

The only thing I suggest you is to not use bass drops too often in a song or in every song of the album, and to be VERY careful when mastering, because it can distort very easily and ruin a beautiful song, as it happened in this video of this amazing Strapping Young Lad masterpiece:

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