I am super irritated with 2.6 (or so) kHz. All my life the harshness of parallel walls or sopranos or something in this region has really bothered me. And other than notching it with a multiband compressor I just don't know what to do. Sometimes I think "Egads! Is that sound really happening in the space?" And... it is. Ugh. I don't know why it takes me so many years to finally "get" what's bothering me. I have a specific memory of hearing a soprano sing at the little barn-theater at my high school and being bugged by it. I remember touring with the Wooster Group and being irritated by it once the volume got too loud. We could pull frequencies out, but it would get too muffled. Of course at the time all we had were sloppy Klark Teknik 31-band graphic eq's. So you could make the sound right when it was loud, but then when you got quiet again the sound was very muffled. It sorta sucked. A narrow-band de-esser might have worked but I don't know if there were any commercially available ones which went down that low (this was the early 90's.) Anyway, I want some nice corrective eq's or something in the way of a phase-coherent hand-limited and frequency-variable compressor (without makeup gain.) For classical music I'm really digging the preamps in the Zoom F8. I know, an unpopular opinion. But they're really great. There's just no inserts or EQ's available. The new version of the F8 let's you record to your computer and to the SD cards simultaneously. I would b interested in knowing what the preamps on (say) a Midas M32r sound like.
Tyrannosaurus Mouse and our recording of The Porcupine's Dream. This is actually the last take we did. The slate stopped working and the cameras ended up being... er... not in sync. But this slower version of the song is my favorite. I'm very happy with my guitar sound. Ethan's bass sound is the best bass sound I've ever personally recorded. I especially dig Greg's slide guitar. Lou is playing an electronic kit with Native Instruments Studio Drummer sounds. The Studio Drummer kit mixes so easily. The hi hats are so smooth and the kick just sounds great without any work.
I've been cheating in a variety of ways. The compressors are mostly (emulated) LA2A's but I'm also putting many or most channels through (emulated) Pultec EQ's using that trick of boosting and attenuating the same frequencies. To me it makes the low end more... well more, but without being muddy. Most of the channels are hitting multiple compressors before they even get to the master buss. At the master buss I have three limiters: a Samplitude "Ammunition" M/S compressor/limiter, and two Fairchild (emulation) stereo limiters set very very lightly -- one being stereo and the other being in M/S mode. Oh, and another limiter on the master buss is the Samplitude "advanced dynamics" mostly lifting up the bottom part of the dynamics which is function that's almost impossible to explain but which I've discovered recently and sounds freaking noice.
So of course I'm last-minute scrambling to get a feature film out the door and... Samplitude crashes on bounce-to-disk
This is my preferred screen layout. Note that when I click on the mixer it sits atop everything but the transport controls and meters. As it should.
This is the solution from tech support:
Please make a reset of the Samplitude programsetting System Options (Y) > Option Administration First load the Samplitude standard Preset from the Preset field. Tick Audio/MIDI Settings, Visualisation Settings and Window positions Click on Restore settings and restart program. Please safe your shotcuts and color options before doing so.
If that doesn't make sense, I made a little video to explain:
I made a quick and dirty tutorial on using a parametric EQ in Samplitude. This is the first episode of the second season of Sound Design Tips and Tricks for Stage and Screen.
All mass produced guitars really are of about the same quality: they're all made by the same machines no matter what country they're produced in
Cheaper guitars have to go cheaper on components for the manufacturer to have a prayer at netting a profit -- making it vastly more economical for the end-user to simply drop in new pickups and the like on inexpensive instruments
Open Air is a library of open source impulse responses. Because. Well, yeah.
Last Wednesday Marc Schmied, Mike Kessell, and I played in Jersey City. Marc went through the Peavey Vypyer as a "bass amp" and I played through the Kemper. I liked the Peavey better than my amp-emulation pedals for the bass when I was experimenting with it. The "clean" Plexi and Twin sounds seemed to be the best. I'm playing my Les Paul throughout. Drums are Abbey Road Late '60's. Later I put in a bit of Hammond organ on some things.
There's a lot a lot a lot of compression on these tracks. Mostly an emulation of the LA-2A, but also some of Samplitude's brilliant M/S compression just to give the whole thing a bit of "finish" to it. More more more...
This is a test of the recording system in my apartment. It's made from parts and pieces of other bits of gear I've had lying around. Getting my Focusrite Scarlett to work on this laptop was a spectacular nuisance. I finally went to using ASIO4ALL drivers and that seems to make the hardware stay connected. Sheesh.
Alice now has Thomastik-Infeld jazz bass strings on her. I'll admit, they do sound very nice. They're thicker than the previous strings so the bass becomes a bit "grindier". I don't know if that means I should adjust the truss rod or raise the bridge or do nothing. I'll find out from Ethan.
Nikolai Kachanov, the director of the Russian Chamber Chorus of New York, wrote these amazing pieces. We recorded them nigh on 6 years ago.
All the vocal performances were done (as far as I remember) at the Interfaith Center up near Columbia University. It was a while ago, so I don't exactly remember. I'm going to guess that we were using Neve 1272 preamps with AKG 460 mics with CK1 capsules. But we may have been using Rode NT1 large diaphragm microphones. Or a mix of those. I vaguely recall recording straight into Samplitude through an Apogee converter.
Every new release of software ends up having a couple issues which confuse lil' ol' me. But one of the best things about Samplitude is the user forum. It's registered, which keeps out some of the riff-raff. And although the developers don't always respond directly, the distributors do and it can be really helpful.
I had a couple problems with the new way Samplitude Pro X handles "objects". And a couple folks on the Samplitude forum, Kraznet and Graham Duncan solved them for me.
The big deal about Samplitude, and why it is so much better than anyone else's software, is the whole concept of "object editing". What that's all about is this: each "segment" or "clip" of audio can have any number of effects applied to it, and volume and fade-in and fade-outs applied.
This saves you from two things which makes audio projects unwieldy. Firstly, it keeps the track - count from going into hundreds of tracks because you don't need a separate track if you want an effect to just be on a brief bit of audio. Secondly it saves from having to automate every damn reverb or EQ setting or bit of compression you put on something. You want a single note on the guitar to have a big ol' delay on it? That's fine -- just take the object/clip/segment* with that guitar note you want and put a big ol' delay on it. (Make sure you set the order of effects so that the delay will ring out past the length of the object and you're all set.) Easier and simpler than automating the send for the delay on the entire track. In the world of music mixing I think that's pretty cool. In the world of dialog editing this "object" methodology of working is a HUGE improvement. For instance on feature films I only use three main dialog tracks. That's it. I only have a total of 29 tracks of audio on my feature film template (and I usually use far fewer tracks on any given act). Not having a bazillion tracks of audio to keep track of makes things go hugely faster for me.
The object editor lets you alter time, pitch, EQ, fades, and any effects you like.
What are the downsides of Samplitude? It's a small company. Making software is expensive. And you're going to have to sacrifice something in order to get the software out on time and actually make some sort of profit. So what do they sacrifice?
Documentation.
Of course that's true with all software. Documentation is always lacking. Writing up new docs doesn't help you sell any more copies of your program and it's very expensive and time-consuming. I'm sure most of their customers would rather they put their minds to bug fixing rather than writing documentation which will be obsolete in a few months. On the flip side, there's the user forum. The forum is very helpful and friendly.
Very large number of edits.
Actually, I don't know if this is a problem anymore. Up through version 8 of the software you could go crazy making edits. Like 20-minutes of dialog edits. Hundreds and hundreds of edits. And the program didn't care. Then starting with version 9 there was a problem with huge numbers of edits. I know that for a while ProTools had this problem too. But eventually Avid fixed it. But back to Samplitude -- what I did was to go down to 10-minute reels for all of my audio-for-picture. That was my work-around for VLNoE (Very Large Number of Edits). Because it's so much easier to deal with 10-minute reels than 20-minute reels I've been keeping the length of our reels down to 10 minutes. And there have been many many versions of Samplitude since this problem first came up. So the problem might not exist anymore. I'm still keeping our reel-length to 10 minutes. Note that for music purposes you almost never run into the Very Large Number of Edits issue. That's only an issue for dialog editors. And I've never had a problem with Samplitude running a memory error when working on a 10-minute reel, no matter how much dialog is in it. I suppose your mileage may vary.
Waveform display
This isn't so much a sacrifice as a philosophical issue with how you like your waveforms displayed. I find that Pro Tools is better for editing music and Samplitude is better for editing dialog. For some reason I find it harder to find dialog ins and outs in Pro Tools and I find seeing the beginning of (say) kick drums harder in Samplitude. Since one gets used to whatever waveform display one is looking at, it's probably not that big a deal ultimately. I edit lots of music in Samplitude and heaven knows I used to edit dialog in Pro Tools like crazy.
So the downsides are pretty minimal. And the object editing is a monster. You're paying ProTools - like prices to own Samplitude, at the same time it's completely possible to work entirely within Samplitude without buying additional plugins.
I gotta get back to work now.
*"Object" is the Samplitude word for what other programs call "clips" or "segments". Objects go onto tracks.
One of the new tools that comes with Samplitude Pro X Suite is a "denoiser" in the "Restoration Suite". The denoiser works on tracks in real-time and you can use a preset noise or a noise sample. The first thing I tried it on was a classical musical recording -- I had a bit of a hum in the left channel of a recording I made for the Russian Chamber Chorus of New York. Chorus, cello, and piano, recorded at St. Joseph's Church in Greenwich Village. [I'm still not so sure what caused the hum. Of course, I bring all the gear back to my studio and can't make any of it hum at all. Perhaps the lights were inducting some noise into only one of the two AKG 460's? Who knows?] Anyway, I tried Samplitude's de-noising on the tracks and... it sounds nice. Very nice. How nice? Well, actually I decided not to use it actually because the "natural" noise reduction of the actual chorus singing overtaking the noise on the track was maybe a bit nicer (this also means that the sound of the hum will probably only bother me as it is so quiet to start with) but the Samplitude noise reduction was surprising in its lack of artifacts -- the way most noise reduction "chomps" on the signal making it all swishy and chewy. I spend a lot of time cleaning up dialog in movies. Not enough time, actually, as we have to mix very quickly. So for a long time I've fantasized about having a Cedar DNS 1500 to run all the dialog through. Instead what I do is run all the dialog through a submix buss that has multi-band expansion, some hard limiting, and now the De-Noiser. Is it better than a DNS 1500 (at about $5000)? No. Are we getting close? Sure thing. Now note that one should go through each piece of dialog in a motion picture and carefully craft the volume and the noise reduction for each phrase of speech. That's not happening. Why? Because I am too lazy we simply do not have that kind of time. So we slam the dialog into the "SMax11" limiter (which is part of Samplitude) and we do all that expansion and noise reduction and we move on. +++++ Samplitude is funny. It's an immense and fully-featured Digital Audio Workstation. And the concepts (especially the "objekt" editing) are brilliant. But the company that makes it is small -- so sometimes the releases are few and far between and they take a bit of updating to get stable. On the other hand, I've been running Samplitude Pro X Suite on a very creaky old computer and (knock on wood) it hasn't crashed. Plus (and this is a big freakin' deal, actually) if I have trouble with a project opening in a newer version of Samplitude I can always go back to an older version. If there are special Samplitude effects the older version doesn't have it'll say "plugin missing", but it will read the project. For those of us who use Final Cut Pro or any Adobe product this is quite the big deal.
Look, screen captures don't show you the video playing in the window!
So, I'm one of those guys who says "Samplitude is better than any other editing/mixing program out there." Exactly, one of those guys. Yeah, I've been a Pro Tools editor. And I've worked with strange systems (Pyramix, etc.) over the years. And still, Samplitude is the best. Now, sometimes people think one system is somehow inherently better than another just because they're used to it. And I can totally understand that. And look, there are things that Pro Tools is very good at -- tracking live bands for instance. But Samplitude is better for editing. Maybe not even for editing music, but better for editing everything else. And it sounds great with music. "But Drew" you say to yourself "how can you objectively say one thing is better? You're just prejudiced because you've been using Samplitude since, like, version 2 or something." And I say: "objective" is right. The big difference is objekt editing. Samplitude does it. Nobody else does. Ergo: Samplitude is better.
(Tanita Tikaram. Not in any way related to the rest of this blog post.)
First of all a disclaimer. All audio editing programs work. And they all sound great. At one time engineers would slag on Pro Tools because they said it sounded bad. Me? I never thought that was so. But now those engineers seem happy again with Pro Tools. Further more, pretty much very major album is recorded and mixed using Pro Tools (even if they go through an analog desk). So the only difference in audio editing/mixing applications is the process of doing that work. OK, I'm glad we got that out of the way. Now:
I do two things: music and sound-for-picture.
In my music life I'm primarily mixing or pre-mixing my own band. And I'm surprised every dang time how nice the comes-with-the-product effects are with Samplitude. You want a nice 1176-type compressor? You want a Pultec or some older-sounding limiters or compressors? The ones built into Samplitude sound fantastic. Really, they're just great sounding. Believe me, you have much bigger problems in your life than the sound quality of the compressors, limiters, EQ's, and reverbs in Samplitude. There are some advantages to the Waves stuff. They're multiband L3 is pretty nice sounding for that horrible squash sound you hear on modern records. But the single-band "L1-like" limiter in Samplitude is pretty good. I do love the analog delays in Samplitude. They just subjectively sound nice. Mmm... nice. In my sound-for-picture life I have much more exotic needs. For instance I need to be able to import OMF files. ProTools has traditionally been very difficult to work with in this regard. And Samplitude used to make you buy something called "EDL Convert" which was like six hundred bucks. But now Samplitude will let you import OMF directly. And it works.
I bought the upgrade to Samplitude, which is called Samplitude X. Right. It's technically version 12, but it's named "X". Fine. I've also reconciled myself to the fact that "Samplitude" is kinda a silly name anyway. So now we're at "X". A 70GB sample library comes with the "Pro X Suite" version. I was a tad confused about how to load the samples 'till I found it was a menu item rather than an installer on the 10 DVD's you get with the program. But once I pressed the icon in the start menu it all worked automatically. There's an automatic updater for Samplitude. It's a tad confusing to me. Actually, it doesn't seem to work at all. Maybe one day it will work. Nobody knows. Samplitude has had a history of "Oh, there's this thing which just doesn't work" which is what you get when you have a small company competing against the big boys (Avid). But the rest of this release is pretty stable it seems to me. UPDATE: the "auto update" seems to work now. To which I say "hooray!"
Automatic Update unfortunately freezes at this screen.
+++++ The "Independence Workstation" comes with the Samplitude Pro X Suite. There are some surprisingly nice horn sounds included. I don't particularly like the piano sounds [UPDATE: oddly, there was a big high-end roll off filter applied to the default piano sound making it very dead - sounding, the piano is much better sounding than I first thought -- just turn off that dang EQ]. Ironically, the pianos included in the Vita workstation (which also comes with Samplitude) I find a bit more "real" sounding. Perhaps the pianos with Independence sound the way they do in order to better mix with an orchestra? I'd that that might be true except that the pianos are a bit dull - sounding and normally to get them to mix better you'd brighten them up a bit. But perhaps the pianos sound a bit more "real" only because they don't have the hyped-up top end of other sampled pianos?
Anyway, those are my first and somewhat incoherent impressions. Seeing as how I have to mix this movie, I'll have plenty more to say about the restoration suite and other features in Samplitude in the coming weeks.
