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A Better Learning Experience
Apr. 16th, 2022 06:13 pmToday's email included an offer for some free plugins from the Plugin Alliance. As we know, the sound engineer who dies with the most plugins wins, so after putting the first load of laundry in, I headed over to the studio to pick up the new plugs.
It took a few minutes to get everything downloaded and installed. Then I figured I would go take a look at them in Cubase. I started up Cubase and discovered that they had released a new set of fixes while I wasn't looking, so I hopped back out and downloaded the patched version. Ok, let's try that again...
One of the plugs was a compressor; another was a mastering plug. I figured I would pick up something simple to work with, so I grabbed the project where I'd recently recorded a couple of vocal tracks for a project that's in process elsewhere in the filk community.
The plugs seemed reasonable on examination, but I wanted to try to give them a bit of a workout. And then I realized that an interesting thing to do would be to lay them across the mixed stereo backing track that I'd been sent to sing against. If I used a sidechain input on the compressor, I could raise the level on the backing tracks in the mix while automatically ducking them slightly when the vocal was in play, as the compressor will follow the sidechain vocal input and use it to determine when to lightly compress the backing tracks.
Of course, I have never actually *used* a sidechain input when mixing in the box, only in the old analog realm. Hang on while I read the manual. (And stop laughing.) I set up the additional send to route the vocals to the sidechain input on the compressor and everything worked, as I could now push the level of the backing tracks up and duck them when I was singing.
I will add this to my toolkit. Should have done it sooner...
It took a few minutes to get everything downloaded and installed. Then I figured I would go take a look at them in Cubase. I started up Cubase and discovered that they had released a new set of fixes while I wasn't looking, so I hopped back out and downloaded the patched version. Ok, let's try that again...
One of the plugs was a compressor; another was a mastering plug. I figured I would pick up something simple to work with, so I grabbed the project where I'd recently recorded a couple of vocal tracks for a project that's in process elsewhere in the filk community.
The plugs seemed reasonable on examination, but I wanted to try to give them a bit of a workout. And then I realized that an interesting thing to do would be to lay them across the mixed stereo backing track that I'd been sent to sing against. If I used a sidechain input on the compressor, I could raise the level on the backing tracks in the mix while automatically ducking them slightly when the vocal was in play, as the compressor will follow the sidechain vocal input and use it to determine when to lightly compress the backing tracks.
Of course, I have never actually *used* a sidechain input when mixing in the box, only in the old analog realm. Hang on while I read the manual. (And stop laughing.) I set up the additional send to route the vocals to the sidechain input on the compressor and everything worked, as I could now push the level of the backing tracks up and duck them when I was singing.
I will add this to my toolkit. Should have done it sooner...