2CAudio Precedence | 1.5 | Move Out Of Flatland. Take Precedence.

[Andrew Souter]

Also for pad sounds, which are generally synthetic and not often encountered in the real world, you can try to use the Precedence the "wrong way". You can add verb to pad first from Breeze 2, B2, Aether or something else, and then add Precedence after it following something like I wrote above in #1. This is not natural, and if we were discussing real orchestral music for scoring I would not recommend it, but I assume we are talking about dance music here and the pad is synthetic anyway, and the kick and bass line will be mostly/entirely mono I assume, so you can exaggerate the width of the pad like this and it will somewhat balance itself out via interaction with the kick, which may also be diving some side-chained compressor on the pad I assume? That might be cool... and it should help keep it distinct from the lead and vocal...

[JoaquinAce]

Thanks! Yes, all your assumptions are correct. This really helps me and gives me a great place to start. I super pleased that I decided to buy Precedence since it adds something that my other plugins can’t do.

[experimental.crow]

i'm demoing now , and liking what i'm getting ...
how long do you plan to offer the introductory price ?..

[bob swans]

i'm demoing now , and liking what i'm getting ...
how long do you plan to offer the introductory price ?..

The discount was supposed to be available for 30 days from the start of this thread but it's still showing so probably worth grabbing it asap before it's gone

[jens]

Also for pad sounds, which are generally synthetic and not often encountered in the real world

Now I am really curious what your definition of "pad" is.

In what way is for instance a string quartet that slowly bows legato notes, each (say) for two bars (creating chords together) not a "pad"?


Lots of pads here, I would say:

https://youtu.be/J7mtmkoZG2Y

[Andrew Souter]

+1 for linking Ennio Morricone!

-1 for semantic arguments.

Sure, string sections are "pads" by some definition I suppose. But in this case the real world is doing exactly what 80 instances of Precedence and Breeze are trying to do for you if you were to record each instrument in an anechoic chamber and then spatialize each and every one of them in this manner.

But a synth with some chorus, multi-delay, flanger/phaser, etc is prob not the same thing. The spatialization coming out of the most synths is not exactly physically accurate to real world acoustics. It's not a bad thing, it's simply not trying (or succeeding) to sound like a real world acoustic space usually. We enter the realm of imagined creative space where there are no rigidly defined rules.

Anyway, another tip for using Precedence on "synth pads" might be to try higher values of any/all the "Delta" controls.

[Andrew Souter]

i'm demoing now , and liking what i'm getting ...
how long do you plan to offer the introductory price ?..

You are safe for all of November at least.

We are exploring the automatic "P-Link" between Precedence and Breeze 2 at the moment, and Denis has made some promising progress on this topic. He's a genius on such high-level system/interface code topics!

We are also looking at offering some form of an "enhanced mono compatibility" mode, for users who care a lot about this topic. I'm been exploring that the past week or two. And trying to finish the manual concurrently.

So the intro pricing is not in danger or ending immediately.

[experimental.crow]

i'm demoing now , and liking what i'm getting ...
how long do you plan to offer the introductory price ?..

You are safe for all of November at least.

We are exploring the automatic "P-Link" between Precedence and Breeze 2 at the moment, and Denis has made some promising progress on this topic. He's a genius on such high-level system/interface code topics!

We are also looking at offering some form of an "enhanced mono compatibility" mode, for users who care a lot about this topic. I'm been exploring that the past week or two. And trying to finish the manual concurrently.

So the intro pricing is not in danger or ending immediately.

thank you , Andrew ...

[jens]

+1 for linking Ennio Morricone!

-1 for semantic arguments.

Sure, string sections are "pads" by some definition I suppose. But in this case the real world is doing exactly what 80 instances of Precedence and Breeze are trying to do for you if you were to record each instrument in an anechoic chamber and then spatialize each and every one of them in this manner.

But a synth with some chorus, multi-delay, flanger/phaser, etc is prob not the same thing. The spatialization coming out of the most synths is not exactly physically accurate to real world acoustics. It's not a bad thing, it's simply not trying (or succeeding) to sound like a real world acoustic space usually. We enter the realm of imagined creative space where there are no rigidly defined rules.

Anyway, another tip for using Precedence on "synth pads" might be to try higher values of any/all the "Delta" controls.

Thanks for your answer. It wasn't semantics though. I just try to understand what you mean. Like my electric guitars, my string-machines have no spatialization whatsoever (or at leat as long as I record the latter in mono, which I usually do, because I think Ubermod does the ensemble effect better than my Elkas) and (say) if I create some string-machine like pad on a synth, it's still the same thing and I don't really see much of a difference to the guitar.

So that's why I thought the slow attack might be what is relevant in this regard (because it perhaps makes it more difficult to locate it) and hence my confusion, which... er... still hasn't really vanished. I still try to understand if this might be relevant for me or not at all - but perhaps I simply have to do some experiments.

[Andrew Souter]

So that's why I thought the slow attack might be what is relevant in this regard (because it perhaps makes it more difficult to locate it) and hence my confusion, which... er... still hasn't really vanished. I still try to understand if this might be relevant for me or not at all - but perhaps I simply have to do some experiments.

Well, yes, an instrument with a slow attack is somewhat harder to localize via time/phase differences alone, particularly if the instrument is also high freq.

Basically, in technical terms you have "phase delay" and "group delay". You can think of phase delay as the difference in phase between two waveforms at the small, single cycle level, such as the difference between Sin and Cos functions which are 90 deg apart. In the real world the distance between two ears/microphones/pickups/listeners determines the arrival time difference between these two points. The time difference translates to some phase delay, which is variable depending on the signal frequency (per component even). The distance between human ears on average is such that the phase delay reaches 180 degrees at around 1000hz. Above 1000hz or so phase delay by itself becomes ambiguous and can not be used to localize effectively bc there are multiple "solutions" that could give the same result.

Group delay is more like the the delay imposed on the much slower moving envelope of the signal. If you a sine wave of 1000hz and started at time 0 (with a simple square on/off envelope) in left ear and started another exactly 10 cycles later in the right ear, the phase delay is 0 for both, but the group delay is 10/1000 = 0.01sec = 10ms. The brain can easily localize this because the attack envelope is delayed.

If instead you have an enveloped sine wave at 10000 hz, that is enveloped by say a "raised cosine" for example that lasts 100 cycles, processing a slow fade in to both L and R, but R is still delayed 10 cycles, or lets say 10.3 cycles actually, there is now some phase delay, but the group delay is very hard to perceive bc the envelope is slow moving compared to the delay time. So this would be hard to localize.

Effectively time/phase differences help localize faster transients, and/or low frequencies. It is less effective on higher frequencies with slow attacks. Gain and spectral differences come more into play at higher frequencies.

Therefore on synth pads in Precedence you might want to exaggerate the Gain and Freq deltas. And it does not hurt anything to exaggerate the Time delta on pads also, since it will have little effect on slow transients, but any kind of "textural micro features" in the pad might be effectively spatialized via time/phase cues and add some interesting perceptual effects.

Also in general, normal recommended practice/guidelines is/are to keep transient material at lower distance in Precedence, and keep pads etc that would normally be in the background, at father distance, which intuitively makes sense, and you would likely gravitate towards naturally anyway particularly when we have the auto P-Link working.

[jens]

Very very helpful reply - thanks a bunch!!!

This I now fully comprehend and in fact I think it should be a sticky somewhere.

I'm glad I initiated this "semantic argument".

[nordickvr]

@Andrew Souter
Does Precedence integrate with other 2C Audio's reverb, e.g. B2, the same way as Breeze 2?

[Andrew Souter]

At the moment Breeze 2.1 has a special mode called P-Link, that makes various adjustments to internal parameters, and to "sync" it to Precedence, you MANUALLY type in the same values in:

* Precedence Distance
* Breeze Mix/Balance

The internal setup is established and "correct" for Breeze, but there is no automatic communication yet between Precedence and Breeze. This is what we/Denis is working on right now. We expect to test it in the next couple days. You will then be able to use the Precedence GUI to control parameters in both Precedence and Breeze, so simply adjusting position in Precedence will update things appropriately in Breeze and they will say synced. This is the goal and this is what we are working on right now.

The link state can be enabled/disabled, so that you can still use Precedence and Breeze independently as well, and you can also use Precedence followed by Breeze on track inserts as we advocate, but disable linking so you can set Precedence and Breeze with whatever settings you like if you happen not to like the setting produced by the auto-linking. (i.e. for electronic music there are less rules about what is real/correct, so maybe you want something non-standard intentionally, etc.)

When we do the next versions of B2 and Aether they will also be "Precedence aware" and have this link ability. At the moment they are not, but they will be. Meanwhile you can still use them with Precedence and simply adjust the verb settings manually as desired the same way you would with Breeze without using P-Link. Precedence is still useful to use with B2 and Aether even without P-Link.

[nordickvr]

Many thanks for those precisions Andrew.

[Sampleconstruct]

Got some great results today using Precedence on a piccolo trumpet recorded in mono, now it sounds wide and open, before it sounded thin and tinny.