120 db/Oct, Micro PitchShift and MaXXBass equivalent.

[Boone777]

So I was discussing high pass slopes on another forum and the idea that 120 db/oct was too steep came up. Some say it has an adverse effect on sound wich I don't hear...care to comment on this ??
Of course sometimes it's just better with gentle slope 12-24 that I hear on certain material but the 120 db/oct I'm concern here is especially on kick, bass and subharmonics.

What plugin of Melda does a MicroPitch Shift ? and In MXXX ?

What plugin of Melda can reproduce the effect of MaxxBass from Waves ? And in MXXX ?


Thank you...

[MeldaProduction]

Well, the bigger the slope the bigger the phase change, but it's more like that if you cut something too steeply, the ear can notice that something unusual happened - 120dB/oct is a filter that just doesn't exist in nature and it can quickly kill all harmonic content above certain range, so it may destroy the clues the brain uses to identify what kind of material it is.
Anyway saying that it is "bad" is, sorry, idiotic , it's like saying that distortion is just bad... It all depends on what you use it on and how .

Harmonizer for pitch shifting. For such microchanges you can use even frequency shifter, but it will alter the harmonic relations.

MaxxBass is simply an extremely simplified MMultiBandSaturator, check it out, there's even an active preset for that. 2 bands, saturate the lower one, that's all.

[Boone777]

Here's what I read on this forum :
I think people often underestimate the steepness of HPF/LPF. 12dB/oct lowpass at 100Hz means, that at 50Hz the volume is reduced by 12dB (=by factor of 0.25). That's massive - just try to pull the fader on an instrument by 12dB.
Steeper the filter is, more "ringing" it has to produce in order to create such steep roll-off (that's a physical fact and actually the principle of the filtering itself). Big ringing can actually have negative effects on the sound - especially transients. Using anything more than 48dB/oct on a musical material is just ridiculous. It only makes sense to use such steep filter in scientific restoration/extracting audio form badly damaged recordings.

This ringing he's talking about I thought that was true for linear phase EQ ( pre-ringing) like I said I don't hear it. Is there something to be concerned cause when I use a steep high pass it sounds good to me usally.It actually helps me get a very focus 45-50 Hz kick for exemple.

[vectorwarrior]

To help visualise the phase issue, here's a before (top of first image) and after (bottom of first image) of a MDynamicEQ 60hz high pass filter on a bass kick sound (second image). As you can see, the area around the cutoff (60hz) smears backwards in time. Presumably this is the cumulative phase shift of all the filters used to create the 120dB filter.

So... long story short, you'll get time smearing around the cutoff if you use very heavy filters like this. Not necessarily horrible but it does impact the sound, as Vojtech always likes to say, 'just use your ears'. If this is particularly unpleasant to you, you can use linear phase, but that introduces the pre-ringing effect which has a different unpleasant effect.

Filter.jpg

filter 2.jpg

[MeldaProduction]

Exactly, vectorwarrior, nice images!

Basically think of it this way: A filter is some black box that analyses the input, sort of detects frequencies in it (not really true but for visualisation) and then manipulates them. Now Imagine YOU are the black box and just a pure sine wave is fed to you . It's just a sine wave, you know it is, so you know its frequency as soon as one period comes in. For high frequencies this is negligible. But for low frequencies a single period can take a long time! So in a way the high frequencies will be less delayed than lower frequencies, which in effects sounds like "smearing". The steeper the response the more smearing occurs.

But as always "use your ears" . Nobody says smearing is wrong! And who does is an i**** . You, being the composer/producer/engineer/whatever, are the only judge. I cannot say this loud enough, people are so focused on what's right and what's wrong, that they forget this is art and most of the community remain in middle ages...