I've made music using computers since the late 90s. I've used probably hundreds of EQs. After some 300 unfinished songs, I can conclude that it doesn't matter what EQ I use, every song I make sounds like shit regardless.
I love your metaphor about practicing with a metronome, one of the joys of music production is that it is extremely technical in theory but always an art in practice.
I love the intro music. 99% of TH-cam DAW tutorials, the music in the video is cheesy, dead, sterile. I wonder if Dan would make a video about this topic - is there a danger if everyone focuses on technical perfection, we end up with a culture of technocrats? The UK has produced so many epic scenes and genres, because of skilled producers who rejected a conformist attitude. Dan, what do you think?
@@theboogie_monsta I just think people need to step back and realize all of the best and most loved music to this day is usually made by some dope ass teenagers with a lot of talent and very often no professional production skills. Most of the best songs have terrible mixes, but it’s the art that is so amazing that our ears actually fill the cracks. For example when I hear Toto- Africa in my head right now from remembering, I’m actually generating a cleaner version than what actually exists, and then when I listen to the song for real my brain still has this overlay playing along with the song. Maybe I’m crazy but I think our brains definitely make music sound better to us than it actually sounds most of the time. It’s a special thing that I don’t hear people talking about, and i would love to see it studied
The Toto song has a good mix I’m sure, especially for it’s time. We have just move so much further and faster with our technology we forgot what matters with music sometimes
Dan, I can't thank you enough man. I am a multimedia artist so I live in tutorial / technical discussion purgatory. Every once in a while, there is a beacon of absolute succinctness and uncompromising neutrality and consideration in terms of fairness to opinions/uses/styles. Just a person who understands the fabric of technicality and its threshold and elasticity in creative practical application. As far as sound goes, you are probably the reigning champion. So cheers for all the hard work you put into teaching.
My jaw dropped when I saw that eq matching the pultec. I guess I'm using pultec style eq because there is no way I'll have the courage to make a curve that intense with a pro-Q type eq. I'm trying hard these days not to look at the eq graph. Thanks Dan
I can relate because I came to this realization just recently ... (precisely that in some plug-ins we can turn off / hide the eq graph entirely and keep the rest) after many years I realized my Sonnox EQ plugin and TDR Nova can have all the same great feature sets with the added bonus of a selectable "ears only" mode as Sonnox calls it or simply hide display. I think more plugins would benefit end user decision making with at least the option to choose. Note, I am full aware there are plenty of options that don't require a graphic EQ display as part of the workflow. ;)
Exactly. I understand that mixing with your eyes is a bad thing, but we are visual creatures, its literally unavoidable. We're almost conditioned to view extreme settings as bad, sometimes its best not to know what's actually going on under the hood
2:51 I also cut my teeth on cheap mixers in the mid-nineties. At the time I was still in awe of the notion that music could travel down a wire. I used to drool over things then that today would seem hilariously quaint. Unlimited channels of multi-band, fully-parametric EQ was a luxury beyond my wildest dreams, and the closest equivalents of the day were many strata beyond my reach. Fast-forward nearly thirty years and the most meager of commodity stock EQ plugins is orders magnitude more powerful and flexible than anything I could have imagined in high school. We live in an age of wonders. Every time I find myself swayed by the latest marketing craze I breathe deeply, glance over at my old Mackie 1604 VLZ leaning against the wall and remind myself that I already have it all.
I feel like I am in a fantasy land when I make music on the iPad, translating my guitar signal to MIDI on the fly with no added hardware, Loopy Pro and plugins are mind blowing! Long gone are the days of Fostex tape 4 tracks etc.
@@mooseymoose those four track tape recorders are highly sought after , the prices they go go for is ridiculous. They’re being used creatively by hipsters looking for the lo fi aesthetic to their sounds.
@@benhall2235 i still have my Tascam Porta07 from the early nineties, but haven’t seen them yet go for ridiculous prices. Perhaps it’s not old enough yet, or the wrong kind of old, it was really the absolute entry level back then (the only one I could afford). But I’m hanging on to it in the hope that by the time I’ll go into retirement, it’ll be worth a fortune 😋
Wow..Ive been involved in music tech from the 80's, seen hardware and plug ins come and go..etc.. Dan, I am not worthy of the amazing , informative, no BS approach you give to all us music minions..... I actually thought I knew what preringing was, how wrong I was.......... You really are the Anchor of audio truth ...Many others just are a stench in stagnant waters... Hats off to you sir.. As for Metronomes , I consider a loop as a more complicated metronome, a feel.......The advantages are sublime...... But yes, I never use it in a mix, after all, it was just a metronome....
What's brilliant about Dan's videos is that they present a technical guide to the intricacies of music production, especially with concepts like phasing or compression. But then he weaves in the philosophical side of production in every example, making you question if all the technical stuff really matters in the end, if what goes into your ears sounds the way you want it to.
I have to say, Spectre at the end of your chain adds that special eq color and magic that I haven't been able to get with any other plugin. It's incredible and it sounds absolutely phenomenal. It's really low latency so you can track with it as well. It gives you that sound that inspires great performances. Plus it's dead simple to use.
This TH-cam channel is a heaven send. I use it all the time. As soon as I think I have a good understanding of audio, I come here and watch one of Dan's videos. This reminds me that I know almost nothing about audio. Thanks Dan! Cheers.
everyone is only good at one thing. dan is good at spreading controversy around the internet by measuring plugins and speaking to his brainless flock with an intimate soft voice
Thank you Dan. After your last video on EQ I started getting a ton of questions from people I know about EQ Phase and which kind of EQ I use in mastering. Didn't understand why the sudden interest until a friend told me about your video. Very glad you followed up to simplify things and remind people to just focus on the result and not so deeply on the tools in the heat of the mix (or master in my case). I think people get a little too caught up thinking there's a BEST solution for every EQ choice, and often the simplest method is the most effective. Keep up the great work.
This guy puts the engineer in audio engineer. That wasn't funny cus it's no joke, one of the smartest and most elegant technical music Production content on the entire web, and it's all available for free here on TH-cam what a blast! Thanks for your content dude you're truly a wizard!
As a software developer I am only beginning to get into the tools and mechanics of audio plugin programming but it occurs to me especially from this video and a few others that one potential solution to finding the right EQ or really any other processor for a specific rather than general purpose might be to have plugins available on a preset basis rather than categorized on brand or type of processor. I see some engineers complain that they have too many plugins but that they bought specific plugins outside of the stock plugins because they had something special. Remembering what that special thing is when you are looking at a list of 10 compressors or EQ plugins I think is too much. If instead you could have a category for snare, kick, guitar, mastering, bus, stems, rock, jazz, vocals, whatever you could find a plugin that fits. Even if the preset was not really a preset but just the default, it would remind you that a specific plugin is good on adding sheen to a vocal or beef to a kick drum. In that case it wouldn't matter how many plugins you had you could find the right one that had something special for what you are thinking about at the time. You could still go right to the UAD LA2A if that's what you want but if you are thinking of a sound color in general and just want to get that it might be better to go by preset. That may be available in some individual plugins but this would be for all. I don't know if this would be at the VST/AU level, the framework level (like Juice) or the DAW level at this point but I think it would be a boost for productivity and creativity.
I am returning from this iceberg trip to day traders nfts and other imaginary scams affecting the lives of thousands. I missed this warm zone of youtube where real knowledge is shared and the gatekeeper dan plays by sharing his ideas and experience.
Great insight on the Linear Phase-behaviour! Sure, you can mimic (almost) everything in EQs like the ProQ3 - but unless you're explicitly trying to: you won't. To me it's very much about workflow and intuitivity. I'll use an EQ that does the pultec thing, because it lets me get to places I'd never get with my regular EQ in no time. When it comes to dynamic EQ mid/side options are very important to me. Nova only does that when you load 2 instances - which just isn't handy. So color me surprised that it was primarily set up to be a dynamic eq. Good video!
Lovely! I agree with your conclusion too! I have self-debunked my perception of the differences between EQ plugins with Plugin Doctor. I still keep some of my go-to Kush plugins around because they are fast and familiar. But for anyone looking to buy some color EQ plugins these days, I'd probably steer them towards the free Ignite Amps Pultec, TDR, and Analog Obsessions plugins. As you said, its more about the interface and workflow. I personally don't think this is worth being repetitively duped out of hundreds of dollars for all the latest "must-have" analog emulations. Save your money for something that will give you a clear advantage :) On the nerd side, Kirchhoff is said to use a gradient of linear phase and minimum phase in the "Mixed Phase Mode" depending on the band frequency.
Use a summed oscilloscope on all tracks with low end material when messing with phase shift it’s much easier to see the lineup. Getting things perfectly in phase by ear is just no
5:30 Dan, acoustically, how does phase shift as frequency response changes? High and low frequencies travel at the same speed. Granted, high frequencies are rolled off by the atmosphere but I don't think to any substantial degree in a home studio-sized environment. I'll also allow that the reflected signals differ in spectra due to the absorbent/reflective properties of a surface. From what I understand, phase shift is only something that can be created with analog circuits or DSP. In rooms, the entire signal (minus air and transmission) is delayed then recombined with the direct signal and other reflections - that's not phase shift but simple delay.
Perhaps more accurate to say that frequency response changes as phase shifts. The sound bounces off a wall or whatever, then interacts with other reflections and the dry signal to create comb filtering: the phase shifts cause the changes in frequency response, just as in a minimum phase filter.
@@DanWorrall Yes but frequency-dependent phase shift doesn't happen acoustically: it's broadband. I'm here because I want to learn more about EQ so I can't expound on how they work. All I know is that EQs affect just the band you're adjusting (more or less as you've demonstrated) whereas acoustic reflections are like a copied and delayed version of the original (give or take depending on the materials the sound encounters on its trip). My only point was that we clarify exactly what 'phase shift' means: it's a subset of delay (just a narrow band of them is shifted by samples to
@@Hexspa delay is frequency dependent phase shift. A given delay time will shift the phase twice as far at 200Hz as it does 100Hz. Hence the comb filtering when combining a delayed copy with the original, and hence the change in frequency response
@@DanWorrall I think I've come to understand this a bit more clearly, thank you. Delay moves all frequencies by the same amount of time but the phase ratios differ. A 1ms delay will phase shift 1kHz by 360deg but 500Hz by 180deg. It's important to note, though, that EQs are not adding back the whole signal to create the effect whereas room reflections are indeed doing that. Analog EQs filter, delay & then recombine the signal to create the effect. I don't know how digital EQ does it. Room reflections are mostly broadband, maybe high passed to a degree, so you get the characteristic broadband comb filtering as a result. Both EQs and rooms are creating filtering but comb filtering is broadband and EQs are more targeted. After all, a comb with one tooth isn't very useful - just useful for one notch.
The kernel of a digital filter requires a buffer of (typically) 2 previous input samples plus two previous output samples. These are multiplied by filter coefficients, then summed to produce the next output sample. So basically, a sample or two of delay, plus a magic feedback loop. That's it.
Great video. To answer to question in terms of base plugin use… I think a good set of eq would be the following: -1 parametric eq -1 m/s capable eq -1 dynamic eq -1-3 colorful eq This is more than enough to have a great selection. Further would be, if it’s to your liking. -1 resonance suppression eq like gullfoss or soothe2 I personally haven’t used a resonance suppression eq but they seem to do “something nice” to vocals once you’ve finished your vocal chain. A little bit of some ai like cleaning. Anyone have experience with res suppression eq?
Personally, I am more and more just using simple console type EQ like SSL or Neve emulations, not because of the “legendary tone” or some famous people recorded/mixed with them (i don’t give a shit about that), but because of the limitations and the lack of visuals force me to listen and be creative instead of staring at a frequency graph and EQ curves and wondering if that “looks” right. Only for some very specific tasks (dynamic or sum/difference EQ) I reach for TB_Equalizer or Nova. (And I rarely ever use a pultec style EQ. I know about the “pultec” trickof course, but I can rarely make it work somehow, especially not on kicks. A bit better on snares, but more often than not I’ll take it of the channel again…)
Basically anything you want to be multiband that isn't. Compression and distortion / saturation are the most obvious examples: you can pick any flavour you like for each band and tailor exactly what you want. That said, it's not something I need to do very often...
Thanks Dan. But what EQ should I be using? Seriously. I've watched this and dozens of other videos (including yours) as well as digging into forums for an answer to the seemingly simple question "What EQ and setting should I be using if I want to apply high-pass cuts to multiple instruments in a track". For some reason this is a contentious topic. With people saying, "it's not worth it because of the phase or pre-ringing problems" to "why would you want to do that anyway, you're probably living your life all wrong." So far the consensus seems to be, to take any eq and set it at a 25db slope and just hope it doesn't negatively color your sound. I make cinematic music that is very busy with orchestra and synths and contemporary rock and roll gear sometimes all playing at the same time. I want to be able to put some of these instruments in a box with high AND low pass filters, without thinking I'm creating all kinds of phase nightmares all over the track, or, you know having pre-ringing on every transient. IDK what I'm doing. Does anyone?
Thanks great vid as usual Dan! Regarding the section on rolling your own crossover filters. I've found that Waves L3 Multi-maximizer seems to do a great job of this by just soloing bands. Have you ever tested that? Very quick and no messing around with the slopes. It nulls with pink noise (original vs. re-combined crossover) even if using all 5 bands. Also it has a lot less latency than Pro-Q 3 in Linear phase mode. Only 3538 samples of delay vs. ProQ's 5184 samples. I'll use the different band solo'd for my parallel drums, bass and vocal busses (for example for bass or drums I'll solo 80Hz and below band, MV2 that to all hell, and blend it back in parallel). I don't do any processing with the L3 (limiting, or dither), just use it as a crossover by solo-ing the bands.
You're using a crossover filter as a crossover filter, which seems like a good strategy! Should work with any multiband plug that allows you to solo bands and not process them otherwise.
@@DanWorrall thanks for the reply Dan! and haha I guess I am using a crossover as a crossover :P - thanks again for putting in all this work and sharing with everybody!
...this implies time travel, and is the work of the Devil..LOL, i died right there !! 😂 No one makes as entertaining videos as Dan... and bloody damn elegant as well!
I found myself disagreeing with the white sea studio channel opinions quite often, there always seemed to be some holes or contradictions in his scientific explanations and justifications, but the final nail in the coffin for my trust of that channel came when he said he didn't like the top end of Nova eq and I realised either his set up or ears were either off, or simply don't align with mine. Fabian is one of today's best audio coders and to my ears Nova's high frequency behaviour is up there with the absolute best paid or free.
Another way to do crossovers with minimum phase filters is to just use a lowpass, set it at the crossover frequency, that's your low band, duplicate it and invert the phase of it, and add it to the original signal, and you get the high band. The idea is you're subtracting all the low frequency information from the original signal, leaving all the high frequencies that weren't cut by the lowpass. You'd probably want to use metaplugin or something similar. I honestly don't know how it performs in terms of metrics, I've never measured it. But I think that's how crossovers are done typically with minimum phase filters.
@@DanWorrall I could've just trusted you, but I got curious, and you're absolutely right. It behaves really weirdly with steep minimum phase filters. And I checked some other band splitters and that's definitely not what they're doing.
Skill is king. You can get a better mix with a stock parametric EQ and tube saturator if you know what you’re doing, than someone with dynamic and passive parametric EQ’s who don’t know what to listen for.
I am digging that teac tape machine emu too. Using it on some game music im working on. It is so smooth with a nice bump in the bass. Rest of the tascam stuff is alright.
Awesome video Dan! Really informative. I found myself using more and more the ToneBoosters Equalizer 4. It's a really great plugin for its price / performance.
@@aKRo228 I think Fix basically does everything EQ4 does (and they made it free as a legacy plugin!). Minus the saturation control. Yeah, both are fantastic. To me, the only significant thing they seem to lack compared to Pro-Q 3 is the spectrum comparison/overlap function. But I'm not even sure I'd end up using it that much anyway so I'm probably going to go for EQ4. EDIT : TB FIX actually has something less I missed compared to EQ4 : the narrowest Q is 5 vs 10 in EQ4. EDIT again : also 6 vs 16 bands
6:11 couldn't be more wrong. FIR linear phase filters are usually implemented using a (generated) impulse response and convolution. You don't need any fft/reverse fft. That's why you'll sometimes hear clicking/distortion with linear phase eq with low frequencies, you're running into the edges of the buffer size for the generated impulse response. Hence the different options for linear phase that add more latency, you're increasing the buffer size so you don't clip off the end of the impulse response.
The reason for the high cpu use is convolution involves floating point multiplication of every sample in the buffer by every sample in the input buffer of the same length, and it does that for every single sample it outputs. Which is more work compared to IIR filter design (which admittedly, I don't understand entirely)
I was under the impression that long form convolution as you describe it is simply too CPU hungry, and that most "real-time" plugins therefore use fft trickery to do it faster. But I could be totally wrong, I'm not a developer.
@@DanWorrall I am a developer. You were mostly correct. Convolution of kernels longer than a few dozen samples is most efficiently accomplished using FFT > multiply > IFFT. This is especially true if the FFT of the kernel is cached ahead of time, which is likely the case in an EQ plugin where the kernel only changes when the user changes it.
@@jkeller51 Admittedly, I'm an amateur when it comes to audio programming, but isn't the result of an FFT necessarily the same length as the source? So how would doing the multiplication on the result of the FFT be any more efficient than doing a multiplication and addition for each sample? You don't have to answer, I'm just expressing confusion. I have some reading to do, it seems.
nice one dan ;-) if you create passive crossovers for speaker you cant use linear phase filters but thats another story... thx for sharing your knowlege and inspiration to explore the tools!
When I flattened the frequency response with minimum phase filters I may have actually created Linkwitz Riley filters. But I wasn't confident enough that was correct to mention it in the video...
What music credits do you have Dan? Where can we find them? Do you have a link to share?? I'm curious that I can't find anything about you and your work as a mixer. Please reply.
I haven't got a wall full of gold and platinum discs I'm afraid. The first 20 years of my career was in live sound anyway. If you're trying to assess my abilities I suggest you check out my own music (my name) which is all me from arrangement to mastering.
I think the pro q3 is the one we are hearing in the mix. The is a bit more click to the drums with it in solo. Listening on the train tho so maybe I’m off.
You can get a linear phase filter without a FFT - the sole requirement is that its impulse response is symmetric or antisymmetric. But then it requires this “time travel” and the latency to process “future” samples to affect the current one.
You and I are maybe the same age Dan, may I pose one question? Why in this age of complete access to online music , philosophy, art and history do people seem to be creating less than WE did when we had little to NO resources? I think its a rhetorical question but it frustrates me . . Take care and thank you for all your work in the library of mespatania.
Agreed, once you have the ear training, you stop thinking about the tools, use whatever you like. let me just say this, I'm 200 million streams in across several genres under several acts all using 99% free vsts and stock plugs of ableton. my main income is split equally between streaming revenue and ghost writing / producing. If you're spending more than minutes on any forum arguing the differences of preference between things like eq or compression quality then you've already wasted that time not making actual music for a living. It really doesn't matter enough (any more) to translate to real world success. By all means have your opinions and arguments, but admit in that context that it is personal subjective preference, not an absolute or demonstrable fact.
For me the Bettermaker Pultec vs Fabfilter Pro-Q3 test was shocking. Is there really a difference? Does the Pultec sound a bit less exact - a bit less crisp, a bit more forgiving? Is it perhaps a tiny amount of saturation I'm hearing? Or can other people not hear any difference?
Hello and thanks for all your incredible content, today I would like to ask you what you think of SPLIT EQ? I’ve been using it a lot and it makes wonder, but sometime I have the feeling that in some case it could make the mix dull or rumbly and I cannot pin point the cause of this…. Sorry for the sudden question and I wish you a great day
I automatically "thumbs up" on Dan's videos before I've even watched them. I haven't "un-thumbs up" one yet as it's highly unlikely Dan would drop a real clanger.
Run two sine waves through a hard distortion, or a waveshaper. Tune them to various different intervals. Don't forget to try the dissonant ones as well.
Seems you have learned how to get the best out of eq‘s from experience of having to use „restrictive“ eq‘s in analog and early digital desks, the same experience as me, the classic being high pass on Yamaha desks, the slope being so slight that to really get the „pop“ out of a mic you needed to run it up to 200Hz, then it sounded really thin so then use the bass parametric to put the bass/low mid back in the signal, basically having to use two eq function to achieve one goal, and then restricting further eq moves because you’ve „lost“ one parametric, and we won’t even talk about early 80#s desks with three band eq, lower two being „semi-parametric“ and NO highpass……yup the people these days have no idea what we had to work with back in the 70 & 80‘s, fondly remember my first Soundcraft 800b, boy was I in heaven, but then came my first Midas, could not believe what a quality was achievable, yeah the good old days……..NOT! And don’t start me on tape machine maintenance and alignment, so much time disappeared there….
I've made music using computers since the late 90s. I've used probably hundreds of EQs. After some 300 unfinished songs, I can conclude that it doesn't matter what EQ I use, every song I make sounds like shit regardless.
lol
As long as you’re having fun!
Stability is a sign of mastery, as we say in Russia.
At least you're consistent👍
Yep, I could make any song sound shit with the most expensive analog EQ one could think of ;)
I want a pultec EQ that talks to me, and tells me how well I am doing at mixing.
But i also wan't it to tell me when my snare sounds like shit :)
@@jakobole I mean, how can it sound boomy and thin at the same time!?
My snare always sounds like shit, so that’s an unnecessary feature.
chatgpt: mixing edition
probably less than a year away with all the AI shit happening
I love your metaphor about practicing with a metronome, one of the joys of music production is that it is extremely technical in theory but always an art in practice.
I love the intro music. 99% of TH-cam DAW tutorials, the music in the video is cheesy, dead, sterile. I wonder if Dan would make a video about this topic - is there a danger if everyone focuses on technical perfection, we end up with a culture of technocrats? The UK has produced so many epic scenes and genres, because of skilled producers who rejected a conformist attitude. Dan, what do you think?
@@theboogie_monsta I just think people need to step back and realize all of the best and most loved music to this day is usually made by some dope ass teenagers with a lot of talent and very often no professional production skills. Most of the best songs have terrible mixes, but it’s the art that is so amazing that our ears actually fill the cracks. For example when I hear Toto- Africa in my head right now from remembering, I’m actually generating a cleaner version than what actually exists, and then when I listen to the song for real my brain still has this overlay playing along with the song. Maybe I’m crazy but I think our brains definitely make music sound better to us than it actually sounds most of the time. It’s a special thing that I don’t hear people talking about, and i would love to see it studied
The Toto song has a good mix I’m sure, especially for it’s time. We have just move so much further and faster with our technology we forgot what matters with music sometimes
You had me at: "This implies time travel and is the work of the devil"
Same here... i was i stiches and could not stop laughing 🤣
😂😂😂
I think it was a David Gibson reference
This is my favourite Dan Wirral video and I return to it regularly
The perfect ratio is about one decent joke per 6 minutes. Gets me everytime.
Dan, I can't thank you enough man. I am a multimedia artist so I live in tutorial / technical discussion purgatory. Every once in a while, there is a beacon of absolute succinctness and uncompromising neutrality and consideration in terms of fairness to opinions/uses/styles. Just a person who understands the fabric of technicality and its threshold and elasticity in creative practical application. As far as sound goes, you are probably the reigning champion. So cheers for all the hard work you put into teaching.
He is an an exceptionally great teacher
My jaw dropped when I saw that eq matching the pultec. I guess I'm using pultec style eq because there is no way I'll have the courage to make a curve that intense with a pro-Q type eq. I'm trying hard these days not to look at the eq graph. Thanks Dan
I can relate because I came to this realization just recently ... (precisely that in some plug-ins we can turn off / hide the eq graph entirely and keep the rest) after many years I realized my Sonnox EQ plugin and TDR Nova can have all the same great feature sets with the added bonus of a selectable "ears only" mode as Sonnox calls it or simply hide display. I think more plugins would benefit end user decision making with at least the option to choose. Note, I am full aware there are plenty of options that don't require a graphic EQ display as part of the workflow. ;)
Exactly. I understand that mixing with your eyes is a bad thing, but we are visual creatures, its literally unavoidable. We're almost conditioned to view extreme settings as bad, sometimes its best not to know what's actually going on under the hood
It’s funny cause I’ve never had a pultec style EQ but have heard people do the trick, I sometimes do up to a 21 DB cut at around 666 hz on my kicks
@@queenpurple8433cutting mids is for new mixers to feel special. yeah treble and bass sound cool doesnt mean bettee
2:51 I also cut my teeth on cheap mixers in the mid-nineties. At the time I was still in awe of the notion that music could travel down a wire. I used to drool over things then that today would seem hilariously quaint. Unlimited channels of multi-band, fully-parametric EQ was a luxury beyond my wildest dreams, and the closest equivalents of the day were many strata beyond my reach.
Fast-forward nearly thirty years and the most meager of commodity stock EQ plugins is orders magnitude more powerful and flexible than anything I could have imagined in high school.
We live in an age of wonders. Every time I find myself swayed by the latest marketing craze I breathe deeply, glance over at my old Mackie 1604 VLZ leaning against the wall and remind myself that I already have it all.
I feel like I am in a fantasy land when I make music on the iPad, translating my guitar signal to MIDI on the fly with no added hardware, Loopy Pro and plugins are mind blowing! Long gone are the days of Fostex tape 4 tracks etc.
@@mooseymoose those four track tape recorders are highly sought after , the prices they go go for is ridiculous. They’re being used creatively by hipsters looking for the lo fi aesthetic to their sounds.
@@benhall2235 i still have my Tascam Porta07 from the early nineties, but haven’t seen them yet go for ridiculous prices. Perhaps it’s not old enough yet, or the wrong kind of old, it was really the absolute entry level back then (the only one I could afford). But I’m hanging on to it in the hope that by the time I’ll go into retirement, it’ll be worth a fortune 😋
@@netwatcherer MIDI Guitar 2 on iPad
@@benhall2235 I had enough of them back in the day, that’s for sure. Plugins can make tape warble and analog saturation just fine these days.
Wow..Ive been involved in music tech from the 80's, seen hardware and plug ins come and go..etc..
Dan, I am not worthy of the amazing , informative, no BS approach you give to all us music minions.....
I actually thought I knew what preringing was, how wrong I was..........
You really are the Anchor of audio truth ...Many others just are a stench in stagnant waters...
Hats off to you sir..
As for Metronomes , I consider a loop as a more complicated metronome, a feel.......The advantages are sublime......
But yes, I never use it in a mix, after all, it was just a metronome....
Lovely. Listened to the whole thing. It was like someone explaining the offside rule to a ferret.
The segment on creating crossover filters is glorious!
What's brilliant about Dan's videos is that they present a technical guide to the intricacies of music production, especially with concepts like phasing or compression. But then he weaves in the philosophical side of production in every example, making you question if all the technical stuff really matters in the end, if what goes into your ears sounds the way you want it to.
I have to say, Spectre at the end of your chain adds that special eq color and magic that I haven't been able to get with any other plugin. It's incredible and it sounds absolutely phenomenal. It's really low latency so you can track with it as well. It gives you that sound that inspires great performances. Plus it's dead simple to use.
The nonchalant way of demonstrating the plugin on screen by talking through it... so slick
This TH-cam channel is a heaven send. I use it all the time. As soon as I think I have a good understanding of audio, I come here and watch one of Dan's videos. This reminds me that I know almost nothing about audio. Thanks Dan! Cheers.
Text-To-Speech is getting better and better! Thanks for your super helpful tutorials!
Would be great to see you mixing a song from start to finish.
everyone is only good at one thing. dan is good at spreading controversy around the internet by measuring plugins and speaking to his brainless flock with an intimate soft voice
@@kimseniorb lol
I just fell over with the “time travel” & “work of the devil” comments.
You, sir, are awesome. Keep it up
You won the internet today with your 'work of the devil' comment. It was the perfect dry read. I'm still chuckling as I write this.
13:57 ...well done, Dan. You've stumped *me* of all people. I cannot tell if that's Spencer, Cider, or Lady Parsec.
Thank you Dan. After your last video on EQ I started getting a ton of questions from people I know about EQ Phase and which kind of EQ I use in mastering. Didn't understand why the sudden interest until a friend told me about your video. Very glad you followed up to simplify things and remind people to just focus on the result and not so deeply on the tools in the heat of the mix (or master in my case). I think people get a little too caught up thinking there's a BEST solution for every EQ choice, and often the simplest method is the most effective.
Keep up the great work.
This guy puts the engineer in audio engineer.
That wasn't funny cus it's no joke, one of the smartest and most elegant technical music Production content on the entire web, and it's all available for free here on TH-cam what a blast!
Thanks for your content dude you're truly a wizard!
The thing about the crossover filters made my day! Thank you Dan 😙
13:30 great explanation!
Stumbled upon this tutorial and wanted to understand the purpose of multiple EQs in a chain. Cheers
every upload from you is goated - thank you
@5:50 one of my favorite meems from Dan. LOL
As a software developer I am only beginning to get into the tools and mechanics of audio plugin programming but it occurs to me especially from this video and a few others that one potential solution to finding the right EQ or really any other processor for a specific rather than general purpose might be to have plugins available on a preset basis rather than categorized on brand or type of processor.
I see some engineers complain that they have too many plugins but that they bought specific plugins outside of the stock plugins because they had something special. Remembering what that special thing is when you are looking at a list of 10 compressors or EQ plugins I think is too much. If instead you could have a category for snare, kick, guitar, mastering, bus, stems, rock, jazz, vocals, whatever you could find a plugin that fits. Even if the preset was not really a preset but just the default, it would remind you that a specific plugin is good on adding sheen to a vocal or beef to a kick drum. In that case it wouldn't matter how many plugins you had you could find the right one that had something special for what you are thinking about at the time. You could still go right to the UAD LA2A if that's what you want but if you are thinking of a sound color in general and just want to get that it might be better to go by preset. That may be available in some individual plugins but this would be for all.
I don't know if this would be at the VST/AU level, the framework level (like Juice) or the DAW level at this point but I think it would be a boost for productivity and creativity.
I am returning from this iceberg trip to day traders nfts and other imaginary scams affecting the lives of thousands. I missed this warm zone of youtube where real knowledge is shared and the gatekeeper dan plays by sharing his ideas and experience.
Interesting. Choosing to be that one happy person may help more than one may think. Love the OCD style approach and the metronome practice metaphor.
I’m always learning new things from you. Thank you ❤
Great insight on the Linear Phase-behaviour! Sure, you can mimic (almost) everything in EQs like the ProQ3 - but unless you're explicitly trying to: you won't. To me it's very much about workflow and intuitivity. I'll use an EQ that does the pultec thing, because it lets me get to places I'd never get with my regular EQ in no time. When it comes to dynamic EQ mid/side options are very important to me. Nova only does that when you load 2 instances - which just isn't handy. So color me surprised that it was primarily set up to be a dynamic eq. Good video!
Lovely! I agree with your conclusion too! I have self-debunked my perception of the differences between EQ plugins with Plugin Doctor. I still keep some of my go-to Kush plugins around because they are fast and familiar. But for anyone looking to buy some color EQ plugins these days, I'd probably steer them towards the free Ignite Amps Pultec, TDR, and Analog Obsessions plugins. As you said, its more about the interface and workflow. I personally don't think this is worth being repetitively duped out of hundreds of dollars for all the latest "must-have" analog emulations. Save your money for something that will give you a clear advantage :)
On the nerd side, Kirchhoff is said to use a gradient of linear phase and minimum phase in the "Mixed Phase Mode" depending on the band frequency.
Use a summed oscilloscope on all tracks with low end material when messing with phase shift it’s much easier to see the lineup. Getting things perfectly in phase by ear is just no
“Effect precedes cause. This implies time travel and is the work of the devil.” 🤣🤣
I really enjoy the myth busting stuff and I would love a video on cables "Do certain cables sound better than other cables?" type of video
5:30 Dan, acoustically, how does phase shift as frequency response changes? High and low frequencies travel at the same speed. Granted, high frequencies are rolled off by the atmosphere but I don't think to any substantial degree in a home studio-sized environment. I'll also allow that the reflected signals differ in spectra due to the absorbent/reflective properties of a surface. From what I understand, phase shift is only something that can be created with analog circuits or DSP. In rooms, the entire signal (minus air and transmission) is delayed then recombined with the direct signal and other reflections - that's not phase shift but simple delay.
Perhaps more accurate to say that frequency response changes as phase shifts. The sound bounces off a wall or whatever, then interacts with other reflections and the dry signal to create comb filtering: the phase shifts cause the changes in frequency response, just as in a minimum phase filter.
@@DanWorrall Yes but frequency-dependent phase shift doesn't happen acoustically: it's broadband. I'm here because I want to learn more about EQ so I can't expound on how they work. All I know is that EQs affect just the band you're adjusting (more or less as you've demonstrated) whereas acoustic reflections are like a copied and delayed version of the original (give or take depending on the materials the sound encounters on its trip).
My only point was that we clarify exactly what 'phase shift' means: it's a subset of delay (just a narrow band of them is shifted by samples to
@@Hexspa delay is frequency dependent phase shift. A given delay time will shift the phase twice as far at 200Hz as it does 100Hz. Hence the comb filtering when combining a delayed copy with the original, and hence the change in frequency response
@@DanWorrall I think I've come to understand this a bit more clearly, thank you. Delay moves all frequencies by the same amount of time but the phase ratios differ. A 1ms delay will phase shift 1kHz by 360deg but 500Hz by 180deg. It's important to note, though, that EQs are not adding back the whole signal to create the effect whereas room reflections are indeed doing that. Analog EQs filter, delay & then recombine the signal to create the effect. I don't know how digital EQ does it. Room reflections are mostly broadband, maybe high passed to a degree, so you get the characteristic broadband comb filtering as a result. Both EQs and rooms are creating filtering but comb filtering is broadband and EQs are more targeted. After all, a comb with one tooth isn't very useful - just useful for one notch.
The kernel of a digital filter requires a buffer of (typically) 2 previous input samples plus two previous output samples. These are multiplied by filter coefficients, then summed to produce the next output sample. So basically, a sample or two of delay, plus a magic feedback loop. That's it.
"This implies time travel and is the work of the devil." - Dan Worrall
Haha yes I chuckled at this
Nice tutorial, one that I can really learn new concepts about my audio plug-ins.
Continually brilliant material presented with a Terence McKenna flair.
thanks Dan, you're a living legend.
I love how the bettermaker does not judge me. That's why its my favorite.
Great video. To answer to question in terms of base plugin use… I think a good set of eq would be the following:
-1 parametric eq
-1 m/s capable eq
-1 dynamic eq
-1-3 colorful eq
This is more than enough to have a great selection. Further would be, if it’s to your liking.
-1 resonance suppression eq like gullfoss or soothe2
I personally haven’t used a resonance suppression eq but they seem to do “something nice” to vocals once you’ve finished your vocal chain. A little bit of some ai like cleaning. Anyone have experience with res suppression eq?
“…this implies time travel, and is the work of the devil” 🤣
Please take a look at Kirchhoff-EQ by Three-Body Technology. it's new and it has some very unique and competitive features.
I own Kirchhoff... it kills Pro Q 3
Personally, I am more and more just using simple console type EQ like SSL or Neve emulations, not because of the “legendary tone” or some famous people recorded/mixed with them (i don’t give a shit about that), but because of the limitations and the lack of visuals force me to listen and be creative instead of staring at a frequency graph and EQ curves and wondering if that “looks” right.
Only for some very specific tasks (dynamic or sum/difference EQ) I reach for TB_Equalizer or Nova.
(And I rarely ever use a pultec style EQ. I know about the “pultec” trickof course, but I can rarely make it work somehow, especially not on kicks. A bit better on snares, but more often than not I’ll take it of the channel again…)
I also enjoy the ssl and find I make much more deliberate decisions with my ears. However I do love the Q3 too
Super interesting video, interested in the crossover filter parts, what are some practical uses in mixing?
Basically anything you want to be multiband that isn't. Compression and distortion / saturation are the most obvious examples: you can pick any flavour you like for each band and tailor exactly what you want. That said, it's not something I need to do very often...
I wasn't too big of a fan of the original IK tape machines, but the TASCAM/TEAC ones are fabulous! The A-3340S is especially tasty.
CPU hogs, though!
@@alexanderewing3779 Absolutely. The sound is worth it though!
Thanks Dan. But what EQ should I be using? Seriously. I've watched this and dozens of other videos (including yours) as well as digging into forums for an answer to the seemingly simple question "What EQ and setting should I be using if I want to apply high-pass cuts to multiple instruments in a track". For some reason this is a contentious topic. With people saying, "it's not worth it because of the phase or pre-ringing problems" to "why would you want to do that anyway, you're probably living your life all wrong." So far the consensus seems to be, to take any eq and set it at a 25db slope and just hope it doesn't negatively color your sound. I make cinematic music that is very busy with orchestra and synths and contemporary rock and roll gear sometimes all playing at the same time. I want to be able to put some of these instruments in a box with high AND low pass filters, without thinking I'm creating all kinds of phase nightmares all over the track, or, you know having pre-ringing on every transient. IDK what I'm doing. Does anyone?
Avoid linear phase. Stop worrying about phase shift. Sorted :)
“ … the work of the devil.” Absolutely perfect.
I love your style. Thank you!
Would love your thoughts on Kirchhoff EQ.
Dan is the official Fabfilter tutor. Don't know if that will ever happen.
Thanks great vid as usual Dan! Regarding the section on rolling your own crossover filters. I've found that Waves L3 Multi-maximizer seems to do a great job of this by just soloing bands. Have you ever tested that? Very quick and no messing around with the slopes. It nulls with pink noise (original vs. re-combined crossover) even if using all 5 bands. Also it has a lot less latency than Pro-Q 3 in Linear phase mode. Only 3538 samples of delay vs. ProQ's 5184 samples. I'll use the different band solo'd for my parallel drums, bass and vocal busses (for example for bass or drums I'll solo 80Hz and below band, MV2 that to all hell, and blend it back in parallel). I don't do any processing with the L3 (limiting, or dither), just use it as a crossover by solo-ing the bands.
You're using a crossover filter as a crossover filter, which seems like a good strategy! Should work with any multiband plug that allows you to solo bands and not process them otherwise.
@@DanWorrall thanks for the reply Dan! and haha I guess I am using a crossover as a crossover :P - thanks again for putting in all this work and sharing with everybody!
Good video, i pretty much only use tone boosters eq4 at this point because of the ease of use in boosting/cutting
...this implies time travel, and is the work of the Devil..LOL, i died right there !! 😂
No one makes as entertaining videos as Dan... and bloody damn elegant as well!
I found myself disagreeing with the white sea studio channel opinions quite often, there always seemed to be some holes or contradictions in his scientific explanations and justifications, but the final nail in the coffin for my trust of that channel came when he said he didn't like the top end of Nova eq and I realised either his set up or ears were either off, or simply don't align with mine. Fabian is one of today's best audio coders and to my ears Nova's high frequency behaviour is up there with the absolute best paid or free.
That crossfade trick is gold
LOL I feel validated in a weird way :). Thanks Dan. Did my own nulltests in the thread and ended up proving my own concern wrong!
Another way to do crossovers with minimum phase filters is to just use a lowpass, set it at the crossover frequency, that's your low band, duplicate it and invert the phase of it, and add it to the original signal, and you get the high band. The idea is you're subtracting all the low frequency information from the original signal, leaving all the high frequencies that weren't cut by the lowpass.
You'd probably want to use metaplugin or something similar. I honestly don't know how it performs in terms of metrics, I've never measured it. But I think that's how crossovers are done typically with minimum phase filters.
You can do that with linear phase filters, or 1 pole, 6dB/Oct minimum phase, but it gets a bit wonky with minimum phase filters with 2 or more poles.
@@DanWorrall I could've just trusted you, but I got curious, and you're absolutely right. It behaves really weirdly with steep minimum phase filters. And I checked some other band splitters and that's definitely not what they're doing.
Do a video on “classic XXX applications” like the pulltec on bass drum thing you did here. Or the 1176 on snare etc...
Thanks Dan. Really appreciate this.
reigning audio champion
Skill is king. You can get a better mix with a stock parametric EQ and tube saturator if you know what you’re doing, than someone with dynamic and passive parametric EQ’s who don’t know what to listen for.
I'm hearing the buttermaker... It's beeping. My butter is ready
I am digging that teac tape machine emu too. Using it on some game music im working on. It is so smooth with a nice bump in the bass. Rest of the tascam stuff is alright.
Awesome video Dan! Really informative. I found myself using more and more the ToneBoosters Equalizer 4. It's a really great plugin for its price / performance.
ToneBoosters Fix is the best dynamic EQ i ever used it's my hidden gem during mastering.
@@aKRo228 I think Fix basically does everything EQ4 does (and they made it free as a legacy plugin!). Minus the saturation control.
Yeah, both are fantastic.
To me, the only significant thing they seem to lack compared to Pro-Q 3 is the spectrum comparison/overlap function. But I'm not even sure I'd end up using it that much anyway so I'm probably going to go for EQ4.
EDIT : TB FIX actually has something less I missed compared to EQ4 : the narrowest Q is 5 vs 10 in EQ4.
EDIT again : also 6 vs 16 bands
This implies time travel which is the work of the devil. I f****** love this man
6:11 couldn't be more wrong. FIR linear phase filters are usually implemented using a (generated) impulse response and convolution. You don't need any fft/reverse fft. That's why you'll sometimes hear clicking/distortion with linear phase eq with low frequencies, you're running into the edges of the buffer size for the generated impulse response. Hence the different options for linear phase that add more latency, you're increasing the buffer size so you don't clip off the end of the impulse response.
The reason for the high cpu use is convolution involves floating point multiplication of every sample in the buffer by every sample in the input buffer of the same length, and it does that for every single sample it outputs. Which is more work compared to IIR filter design (which admittedly, I don't understand entirely)
I was under the impression that long form convolution as you describe it is simply too CPU hungry, and that most "real-time" plugins therefore use fft trickery to do it faster. But I could be totally wrong, I'm not a developer.
@@DanWorrall I am a developer. You were mostly correct. Convolution of kernels longer than a few dozen samples is most efficiently accomplished using FFT > multiply > IFFT. This is especially true if the FFT of the kernel is cached ahead of time, which is likely the case in an EQ plugin where the kernel only changes when the user changes it.
@@jkeller51 Admittedly, I'm an amateur when it comes to audio programming, but isn't the result of an FFT necessarily the same length as the source? So how would doing the multiplication on the result of the FFT be any more efficient than doing a multiplication and addition for each sample? You don't have to answer, I'm just expressing confusion. I have some reading to do, it seems.
It's not one multiplication and addition per sample. It's *size of kernel* multiplications and additions per sample.
nice one dan ;-) if you create passive crossovers for speaker you cant use linear phase filters but thats another story... thx for sharing your knowlege and inspiration to explore the tools!
When I flattened the frequency response with minimum phase filters I may have actually created Linkwitz Riley filters. But I wasn't confident enough that was correct to mention it in the video...
What music credits do you have Dan? Where can we find them? Do you have a link to share?? I'm curious that I can't find anything about you and your work as a mixer. Please reply.
I haven't got a wall full of gold and platinum discs I'm afraid. The first 20 years of my career was in live sound anyway. If you're trying to assess my abilities I suggest you check out my own music (my name) which is all me from arrangement to mastering.
Thanks Dan. Another great video.
I think the pro q3 is the one we are hearing in the mix. The is a bit more click to the drums with it in solo. Listening on the train tho so maybe I’m off.
Im very happy with fabfilter for subtractive and some acustica nebula programs for additive.
Very interesting. Any good sources to be able to understand this video from 5:00 onward?
Inspiring -
Thank you Dan
You can get a linear phase filter without a FFT - the sole requirement is that its impulse response is symmetric or antisymmetric. But then it requires this “time travel” and the latency to process “future” samples to affect the current one.
th-cam.com/video/eSyCuuSzuE4/w-d-xo.html
Hahaha, I love those comments about linear phase... "this implies time travel, and is the work of the devil." 😂
You and I are maybe the same age Dan, may I pose one question? Why in this age of complete access to online music , philosophy, art and history do people seem to be creating less than WE did when we had little to NO resources? I think its a rhetorical question but it frustrates me . . Take care and thank you for all your work in the library of mespatania.
Just here to say thanks again Dan.
i hear the reverb more in the pro-q3 example! implies a lot really
Work of the devil 😂
Great video 🔥
Dan is seriously carrying future generations engineers on his shoulders
5:55 looks like I'm only using the linear phase on metal tracks from now on
Hello Dan,
can you please make a video about the DMG Audio EQuilibrium and MAAT EQOrange and why they are so pricey.
"Which one are you hearing right now?" (in the mix) -> The Pultec!
5:55 So there I was, trying to pick an EQ plug in, and accidentally summoned Lucifer.
It does that through the mix itself.
Agreed, once you have the ear training, you stop thinking about the tools, use whatever you like.
let me just say this, I'm 200 million streams in across several genres under several acts all using 99% free vsts and stock plugs of ableton. my main income is split equally between streaming revenue and ghost writing / producing. If you're spending more than minutes on any forum arguing the differences of preference between things like eq or compression quality then you've already wasted that time not making actual music for a living. It really doesn't matter enough (any more) to translate to real world success.
By all means have your opinions and arguments, but admit in that context that it is personal subjective preference, not an absolute or demonstrable fact.
Can you make a video about Multiband compression and potential issues with multiband crossovers ?
Haha the linear and non linear phase argument was class
For me the Bettermaker Pultec vs Fabfilter Pro-Q3 test was shocking. Is there really a difference? Does the Pultec sound a bit less exact - a bit less crisp, a bit more forgiving? Is it perhaps a tiny amount of saturation I'm hearing? Or can other people not hear any difference?
Hello and thanks for all your incredible content, today I would like to ask you what you think of SPLIT EQ? I’ve been using it a lot and it makes wonder, but sometime I have the feeling that in some case it could make the mix dull or rumbly and I cannot pin point the cause of this…. Sorry for the sudden question and I wish you a great day
I automatically "thumbs up" on Dan's videos before I've even watched them. I haven't "un-thumbs up" one yet as it's highly unlikely Dan would drop a real clanger.
Hey Dan, what kind of Leadsound do you use at 14:15? Is it made with ringmodulation? Nice Track again!
Run two sine waves through a hard distortion, or a waveshaper. Tune them to various different intervals. Don't forget to try the dissonant ones as well.
@@DanWorrall thank you very much!!
@@DanWorrall i come from modern jazz, the dissonant ones come first ;)
great explanation!🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻
Seems you have learned how to get the best out of eq‘s from experience of having to use „restrictive“ eq‘s in analog and early digital desks, the same experience as me, the classic being high pass on Yamaha desks, the slope being so slight that to really get the „pop“ out of a mic you needed to run it up to 200Hz, then it sounded really thin so then use the bass parametric to put the bass/low mid back in the signal, basically having to use two eq function to achieve one goal, and then restricting further eq moves because you’ve „lost“ one parametric, and we won’t even talk about early 80#s desks with three band eq, lower two being „semi-parametric“ and NO highpass……yup the people these days have no idea what we had to work with back in the 70 & 80‘s, fondly remember my first Soundcraft 800b, boy was I in heaven, but then came my first Midas, could not believe what a quality was achievable, yeah the good old days……..NOT! And don’t start me on tape machine maintenance and alignment, so much time disappeared there….
To me the waves SSLEQ adds a papery quality to high mid boosts. Is it saturation?
I had no idea time travel was the work of the devil. But, looking back at Back to the Future, I guess I can see your point.
really great video, so indepth :) What is the music you play in the background, its really apt
The shade - haha. "I'm one of those normal people..."