Hi stoobie - this technique is based on the assumption that you really need to create highly isolated bands using steep filters as opposed to using conventional band-limited or frequency sensitive methods to manipulate your audio. Once you're past that border the thing is pretty simple...stoobie wrote:Kylen, I've never understood exactly how this works. Do you know of any step by step tutorials on this subject? Or if it's a simple enough concept, can you provide a step by step?
Here's basically what I do. Listen to the track, submix, or mix that I've tried to balance conventionally. Does it really sound balanced - or does the ear pick up compression artifacts. Turn off the plugins that aren't working then and listen again. Is there anything sticking out of it too far that really catches the ear that you can pin down to a certain frequency range? If so then maybe breaking the spectrum down using steep isolating filters and rebalancing the dynamics and EQ (or anything else) will help. You get a different feel and sound in this multiband approach than you get with T-Racks MB Limiter (very gentle slopes - probably 1 pole or 6dB/octave, hehe I learned this today at KVR) or Sonitus MB compressor or Endorphin, for example.
Here's what I did to rebalance a previously recorded drum machine stereo submix that just wasn't working in the mix.
1. Listen to the full mix and drum stereo submix and try to hear what's wrong. The kick 'thud' was fighting the bass guitar so that would need isolation, the snare needed it's 'crack' adjusted, the hihat 'tic' was just plain irritating. So that told me I needed to deal in 3 freq bands - thud, crack, tic.
2. Where to set the crossovers? Voxengo SPAN gives me the ballpark then finetune it in FreEQ Boy. I decide on a 120Hz lowpass for the kick, snare midrange bandpass is 120Hz-10KHz, hi-hat treble highpass is 10KHz-20KHz.
3. Setup the 3 new drum bands. In Sonar4 I clone the drum stereo track 3x so there are now 4 drum tracks - leave the original drum track in tact to compare with the new drum submix that's being created, otherwise leave it muted. Insert FreEQ Boy into each of the 3 new drums tracks.
4. Create FreEQ Boy filters. Wide Boy (Paul) showed me how to do it in this thread:
http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... =freeq+boy
Open a notepad in Windows and save the following in individual '.txt' files.
This makes a 120Hz lowpass filter (lopass 120Hz.txt):
Code: Select all
0.0 0.0 0.0
1.0 0.0 0.0
1.0 1.0 1.0
120.0 1.0 1.0
120.0 0.0 0.0
22050.0 0.0 0.0
This makes a 120Hz-10KHz bandpass filter at about 100db/octave - very steep (mid bandpass 120to10KHz.txt):
Code: Select all
0.0 0.0 0.0
120.0 0.0 0.0
120.0 1.0 1.0
10000.0 1.0 1.0
10000.0 0.0 0.0
22050.0 0.0 0.0
This makes a 10KHz hipass (hipass 10KHz.txt):
Code: Select all
0.0 0.00000000 0.00000000
10000.0 0.00000000 0.00000000
10000.0 1.00000000 1.00000000
22050.0 1.00000000 1.00000000
6. Now insert whatever dynamics plugin you like on the new drum-lopass, drum-mids, drum-hipass tracks after each FreEQ Boy. The inserted effect will control the range set by VreEQ Boy. Some compressor/limiters do better than others on bass. I was using PSP MixPressor on bands < 250 Hz since it handles bass really well. Now I just put Voxengo Elephant on any tracks I turn into multi-band since it is so transparent and responsive now with the EL-3 mode. And since Sonar4 handles plugin delay compensation I can put anything on any track without goofing it up (any worse than it already is...).
So this is why I made the comment earlier about a multi-band Elephant - it might even rival the new Waves L3 in this mode, who knows? With FreEQ Boy and a PDC host any plug is a steep-slope multiband now.
PS: Sorry for chewing up a lot of real estate yaking...
Anything mackie or jules adds "for free" in tracktion, has already been paid for or will be paid for by the users. To me, free does not mean "included with this, but you ofcourse have to pay for the whole package" 
