And the benefits have been tremendous! Less plugin menu diving. Faster decision-making. And best of all, I've been delighted and reminded by how much amazing value lives in Logic's native tool kit. So if Logic has it all, why even indulge the "desert island" plugin question? Plugins that adapt to audio in that way that only computers can.
For example, Logic's Channel EQ is great. That is until you have a resonance howling and floating around the frequency spectrum like some ghoul. Of course one could automate an EQ band to wander about playing whack-a-mole. But the results are often only "okay" at best. And where there's one resonance, there's usually more to contend with. This is why oeksound's Soothe2 is my must-have processor to complement Logic's toolkit.
Soothe2 takes erratic and unpredictable frequencies and eradicates them. Or to put it another way, Soothe2 is a "deresonator. But unlike static or even dynamic EQs, Soothe2 doesn't camp out on a single set frequency.
Oh no, Soothe2 will chase resonances where ever they try to hide. It's like a mix engineer's personal EQ homing missile! From the moment you place Soothe2 on a track, it gets right to work in reducing the levels of resonances. From there you can globally decide how hard it digs into your track with its Depth control.
And most of the time adjusting just this one knob is enough to rein in an unruly track. I even will place Soothe2 on my mix bus to gently tighten up a full mix. But once in a while Soothe2 can be overeager. And it may chew into frequencies you might not deem problematic. For example, maybe you're more interested in taming some muck down around hz, but Soothe2 is hellbent on carving into hz.
This is why Soothe2 also provides its handy EQ display. Which allows users to specify where exactly de-resonating should occur. Setting Soothe2's high and low-pass filters lets the plugin know to avoid using its magic above or below those set frequencies. Boosting a band tells Soothe2 to dig deeper into a particular frequency area. While reducing a band tells the plugin to pay less attention to non-critical areas.
When I think of the tracks I've found the most difficult to gel into a mix, they most often were a highly dynamic, and b at the mercy of several factors in the recording chain. Where the performer, performance, miking technique, or room were all potentially suspect.
Oeksound's Soothe2 lets you leapfrog past all the tail-chasing. An absolutley vital mix tool. This is a no-brainer. Lately, I experiment more with mixing in immersive sound. The channel strip is where you adjust the volume and sound of a track. Turn the bands on or off by clicking the colored filter icons at the top of the interface.
Boost or cut the bands by any of the following:. To the right of the graphic display, you can adjust the gain of the entire track with the gain slider.
Record your project well and you might not need to use much EQ. These tips will help you when you do need EQ:. Mids are catered for with a semi-parametric band from about Hz to 7kHz , leaving the tops covered by a silky shelving EQ set at 12kHz. On the whole, Graphic EQs tend to get a bad name in the studio, mainly because the band divisions are relatively coarse by comparison to a fully-sweepable parametric equalizer. That said, the API is still a well-loved sound-shaping tool, partly thanks to its Proportional Q.
Put simply, Proportional Q means relatively small amounts of cut or boost will result in a musically-wide Q setting. Push the frequency harder, though, and Q will become sharper, applying a more focussed cut or boost to the signal.
Technically speaking, the single plug-in is actually a replication of two valve equalizers — the shelving-like Pultec EQP-1A and the more mid-range-focussed MEQ-5 — hence the two power switches on the plug-in.
The controls on the Pultec are slightly unconventional — for example, the Low section provides both a Low Boost and Low Attenuation that can be applied at the same time! Though somewhat counter-intuitive, the walk-through details some of the unique sonic quirks that the Pultec is famed for, which, of course, can be perfectly replicated on the Vintage Tube EQ. One feature common to all three Vintage equalizers is a Drive control, designed to replicate the small amount of soft saturation the original hardware equalizers would produce.
Additionally, I used the auto-gain option at 0dB and introduced some subtle soft-clipping distortion. Lastly, I reduced the output gain by 2dB and blended the effect into the signal with the Mix dial. If you want to learn more about compressors, check out this blog post and video on the topic:. It was really great to see that Logic provides a Pultec EQ emulation, perfectly suited for mastering with all frequency ranges available for adjusting. I boosted and attenuated the low frequency to achieve a particular shelf-curve, as well as boosted some of the high-frequency range to add some air to the track.
For the phase I chose natural, but linear works well too if you want a truly clean sound. Lastly, I introduced a small amount of tube distortion to make the signal sound fuller and more pronounced. The Exciter plugin has a very simple layout but is incredibly powerful so use this plugin carefully. This plugin works by capturing the harmonics of a signal and then amplifying them. This is why I chose to add some harmonic distortion in prior to this plugin so that I could amplify and bring it forward with this plugin.
I set mine pretty low around Hz to avoid exciting sub-frequencies. I keep the harmonic excitement percentage to about 0.