MPA - Part 2.

You already be history story. Welcome the Pro Audio Suite. Those guys are professional and motivated with text. The video stars George Wisam, founder of Source Element, Robert Marshall, International Audio Engineer Darren, Robbo Roberts and Global Voice Andrew Peters. Thanks to tribooth oustre and Audio Making Passion, her Sauce Elements, George the Tech Wisdom and Robbo and AP's international demo. To find out more about us, check the Pro Audio Suite dot com and don't forget the code TRIPAP two hundred that will get you two hundred dollars off your try booth. Now, this is part two of our conversation we had with Michael Pearson Adams Go Mayes if you like. From Waves, this week's discussion kicks off in a different place. We're talking about hearing loss. Okay, I don't know. I don't want to take this half the rails too far, but tell me to come up in the last couple of weeks more than once. So it seems to be well. I wouldn't say maybe to coincid, but maybe it's just the sign of the times and the fact that my clients are all getting older. But people are having a hard time finding headphones that work well for them anymore because of hearing loss. And you know, so the topic came up. One person asked me about having their hearing aids tuned for professional audio. Another person asked me about just choosing headphones that are better for their hearing and nothing like that. Nothing that they tried worked well, probably because they have severe hearing loss. I was going to say Friday, but normally icecreen, right, So what I'm getting at is, I've been wanting to start focused. I've been starting to want to build a chain from monitoring, specifically especially for those with some hearing loss. And you know, I'm wondering what of the tools that you got you think might be useful, Like if I was going to build a studio rack for a monitoring chain, is it just EQ or I'm actually looking at compression and EQ together because you know, if you've lost some hearing in a certain band and you boost a bi Jesus out of that band, that could be bad too, Right, two syllables F six F six okay, F six six floating bands of multi band equalizing compression gives you the ability to choose the threshold on each and every one of them, move them around and actually decide how each of those bands is compressed or expanded based on the reaction of the of the voice coming into it. To me, that would be the best starting place for you to create a chain like that would be that plug in, because it has to it's a very It's obviously the only person that can decide if it sounds right is the listener, like the person that has a lot. So the way I would have to do it would be to log in remote source, connect in remote into their screen, load the plug in, you know, put it into a chain, and then and then just hide everything and give them the macros and name the macros appropriately. Yeah yeah, well that yeah, that would be the end result exactly, you know. But but to have that ability for them to sculpt the sound of their own headphones in a way they never could before, this sounds like the right tool to attack that. I want. I want to start looking into building those chains for people because hearing loss is an issue. There is a risk there as well, of and I talk about this in a completely different way for this than I would if this was music. Say, for example, in the music world, we have the lowest latency as in zero latency vocal tuning, plug in waves tune and waves tune live, and there's always been a lot of stigma about, oh, you can't have tuning. It's like one of the best things a tuner can do, if it's used properly, is give the singer competence, not fix them, but give them confidence. So if it's on the monters, it gives them confidence to remember that they are good and they can do a great job, and that in itself, that confidence minimizes any sharp or flat notes because they're not nervous. Now on the other end of that spectrum, George is in a voiceover world. The first thing that comes to my mind is a concern by creating a chain that lets them hear it properly is making sure that they're not hearing to use an analogy to make sure that they don't think they're in a Porsche when they're in a VW. As far as other equipment, because audio processing can make you sound amazing, but it also could hide multiple issues with the track that you're recording if what they're monitoring isn't what's being sent to the client. Oh me, I would never recommend someone who has loss of hearing loss, unless they are an actual engineer with years of training. I would never suggest that they go into this thinking that they're going to fix their own monitoring themselves without the ears of another engineer or an engineer with good hearing or trusted hearing that can make a judgment for help judge them on where those settings should be. I know, they could dig themselves into a heck of a big hole. And it can't be a response. It cannot be a replacement for a proper for everything else that we talk about, proper acoustics, noise floor by technique, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Well, usually with hearing loss, it's the upper frequencies that go first. So my idea would be to talk to Yamaha and get them to build headphones that sound like in its tens. Huh. Well, the headphones that you have, you're still using the Austrian Audio fifty five's right, the X fifty five. Yeah, man, when I reviewed those with you, and I thought they were too mid range forward, right, I didn't like the way they say you right, But for you they were a great match. Right. Yeah, that's the thing. And so headphones are again extremely subjective, but it can be a maddening process to try out a lot of different headphones. Like this client of mine, what was the headphone that like rang out your ear from the inside and then like I try your curve. Yeahhea did that work? They were really uncomfortable. Yeah. Really they had in ear plugs that plugged into the inside of your like you know, in they literally went into your ears, and then they had a surround cup that went around the outside of the ear. It was it was a little bit. It sounds horrible. They sound like they sound like my in ear, like the one they call dorotones or noras something I can't remember they were called. I return them. But the idea of there being that, yeah, you can make if you can make corrections to a point, and then eventually your hearing loss is going to be too too poor. But well also you can't corrected, and when you can't hear at some point, right, so just craking it up, just you know, you just end up with feedback through your hearing. Well that is true. Yeah, well, I mean my my my friend is an optometgy or optronomist. My friend is an audiologist, and they said, you know the damage. The danger is if you do continue to continue to boost let's say four K, two K, whatever the frequency band is, lose the need you will you're still subjecting that SBL on the air drum or more, continuing to cause damage. So it's a it's a it's a tricky situation. But thanks for the f SEX recommendation. I look, so there's a couple of things that about that. While we're talking about I just want to mention briefly for all you lovely people out there, quick analogy. On my phone, I have a setting on my phone, just in the basic phone settings that limits the loudness that is allowed in my headphones on my phone, and I can change it to whatever dep I want, and I have it set fairly conservatively because I value my tool that makes me money, my ears. But then on top of that, I also have a pair of very large monitors here in the studio that I have a mark on the output knob on the audio interface that I do not go above because at that point I know that I'm damaging my hearing. So my advice is always get used to listening as low as possible because you can. And this is something that Jeff Thomas told me robo years ago when I was his student, was if you can hear everything at a low volume, then it'll sound great loud. If you hear everything when it's loud, you won't hear everything at a low volume. You do have to stay at the right place when you're mixing within like the Fletcher on some curve, to make sure that you're not you know, you know, if you're listening too low and you don't ever check it out up there for just a moment and that like I'm not talking about like hear damning like hearing damage level, but you'll just lose the base and the high end. It's just sort of the way that you're like at lower levels loses the outer extremities first. So I think, like anything though, I think you know, you're like checking your mix on different monitors. I mean I always check at different volume levels, I mean different levels. Yeah, the dim button is regularly used for me. You know, I'll sort of I'll listen to it in the past and then I'll dim it and switch monitors and have a listen that way. And yeah, just flick around. I mean, you you could muck around with a mix forever, I guess, but you know, I think they're they're the two essential things is volume and different monitors. I'm constantly surprised going when I think back when I was living in Sydney and in Excess had Rhino Studios Rhinoceros, and I was therefore they recorded. I think I was for Kick an X. I can't remember. No, it's definitely kick. It was Kick, yeah, So I was in there for Kicking. And I remember sitting there and when they were recording and stuff, and it was Chris Thomas. And then someone said, oh, we're just doing a playback of one of the songs. I think it was going to be the single, like I can't remember, come and come and listen. So we're into another room to listen to the playback. It was so fucking loud. I don't even know what the song was. I had no idea how. I don't know what they were hearing because I couldn't hear anything. Probably what you need the first single was it? Probably. I hate it when people like, like, when you're in a room and it's really loud, and you're just like, I don't want to be in here, and you got to get out but yeah, you really shouldn't go above like what like eighty or you should keep that like maybe the top average. Yeah, maybe peaks of ninety two hundred maybe yeah, maybe. Yeah. It is amazing that the iPhone has the building now to monitor your surroundings and it will actually or of the watch, I think more so, And that's almost like a reason to get the watch. I keep trying to not buy the damn freaking Apple Watch, im like, I don't want another addictive gadget. But the fact that it does monitoring that the noise levels around your environment and lets you know, yo, you were in an unsafe noise level environment, just so you know, it's very it's a really good idea. I mean, it's almost a reason to get one of those things you tip to conye watched you're hearing you in your headphones Unfortunately, No, no, I can't do anything for a headphone. No, you're you're absolutely right, absolutely right. I wanted to ask a question a little bit more and the if Gomez is here, But so I love the C four and I use it like an EQ and I use it like a compressor and it's my ds er and it's just like whatever the hell you want it to be. And the F six is kind of a dynamic EQ. The C four is a multi band compressor. You see how the different frequency bands work. Essentially, like you're able to tune the F six more precisely. That is very true. But what the other kind of differences between say, a multiband compressor and a dynamic EQ. Oh boy, and in like what uses? Wow, that's this is okay. So firstly, let's talk about the C four, right, So the C four was a plugin that we developed not for studios, but we developed it for live and it kind of was a mixture of Okay, so let's deal with something that gives you compression expansion but limiting dynamic EQ normally Q and then has you know, this one floating band which we honestly didn't think anybody would use. And then everybody lost their ship over the floating band of the C four. Sorry, sorry, not the C four. So when we updated it, when we went to the C six, we put we put the floating band in because because people are like, do you know, do you know what I lost my shit over in the C six? What was the individual key per band? Oh? You said, that's it's just that's so awesome. Yeah, like you can like it's like automatically dug it, but you don't have to duck the whole music. You can just sort of carve out some frequencies for the voice and it doesn't say the music like fell out of nowhere. Well, the beautiful thing about it is it lets you apply per band compression, expansion, UPWUT expansion and to a point dynamic EQ. This was a tool that again is still very very much a broadcast person and live person tool. And we found a lot of studio people, not old studio people, I'm not going to generalize, but we found a lot of them were like, we just can't work out the use case for this d Yeah, like why why have a ds er when you can just have a multi band compressor with a little compression on the high end, Because it's not the way you're you're thinking with your broadcast and your post production had on, not you music production hat on. So now let's go to one of my favorite products, the F six. The F six is literally okay, so everybody loved the floating bands in the C six, so let's just give them six floating bands. What we did was we took our best code of parametric EQ and let you boost, cut, define, change the thresholds, cues everything on it, so that you know your EQ basically flows with the music dynamics and it's not just a static boost or a static cut. One of the best things that you can do with the F six is go okay, right, so you know, use it as an EQ if you want, but then if you actually then choose okay, cool. So on this one, I'm going to make this a mid or a sides processing channel, and on this one, I'm going to use this one with an external side chain. You can have all of these things going on, and every single one can have a different side chain if you want to. The F six has a separate side chain for each band. Yes, very sick. So I kind of think of one of the differences as being the multi band approach, where you have the filters that are always going to trade off with the next frequency band sort of keeps you in line, keeps you more flat, and you're kind of doing more general sculpting, whereas the uh the F six being you know, you got bandwidth, you can overlap things, you can poke a hole in this, and nothing that oh I use it for coving it. I use it poking a hole in the mix all the time. It's it's, it's I'd say that it's it's much more possible to get lost in the F six, and it's possible to I mean, I like, obviously with the C four you can do crazy stuff as well, but just that nature where the bands don't overlap and you're always dealing with sort of an wull amount across the board. I mean the crossover. Having the crossovers and the visualization of the crossovers between these plugins has helped people a lot. But I actually find more people in userland from US get confused when they're talking to me about Okay, so talk me through the C four. And this comes down to development and research and design as well. It's like C four I find confuses people on getting the best out of it way more in twenty twenty three than the F six. The F six they look at and go, oh, okay, cool, all right, I understand it because we made it feel and look more like an EQ than compression. But it's both. Yeah, I really like the design on that. I'm going to start exploring it more. I've played around some others, and this one looks more powerful and more flexible. And to be able to set up a ds or through the precision and de Harsher do all that dynamically, that's very compelling. I can set that up on a chain. I love this plug it, I really do. It's the go to plugin in my template to with you. Thank you, really, thank you. Hey, I want to I want to throw one at you, And you could maybe dispel a bit of an argument that I've had with a few people. I want to talk about presets for a minute. Because the presets that come with wave stuff are usually very good. There's no arguing with that. But I come across two schools of thought. I come across the people who basically go, I love the you know such and such preset on this plug in. So I just I put the plug in on the track and I turn it on, and now I really play with it. My argument would be that yes, it's it's a great preset and it sounds good, but it's designed around someone else's voice, a different instrument, a different sounding instrument, whatever that the case may be, it's always going to need some tweaking. Would you firstly, when we're talking about presets. I feel like this year, well actually in the last two or three years, we've kind of moved across a big bump of discussion and we've gone from presets are bad, it's like it's cheating and all this kind of crap. Two presets are great. Thank god. These software companies, you know, put so many of them in Let me just take you through for a second. So everybody knows how these presets come about and how much time goes into them. So one of the first things that happens is the product manager and the team waves or whichever other company I'm going to guess they do roughly the same. Clearly, not that's good because we're else, but you know, it's like the person who knows the plug in best is usually the product manager, and so a lot of those initial presets will come from the product manager because you know the average plug in, he's in charge of it through development, and that could be up to five years sometimes of living with that tool and working through development, QA testing, beta testing, going back, fixing things back into it again. So you get to know this tool intimately, and through that you get to create presets because of your intimate knowledge of that specific plugin. But then what we do is we have an artist relations department run by a mate of mine by the name of Kitai Barak and Guitai will take these software tools, these plugins, and he'll reach out to all of our artists that are waves endoorsed to artists everybody from you know, like the Crysal of Algae's, Tony Maserati's Eddie Kramer's through to many American and Andrew Sheps and all the others armand van Buren, Dead Mouse and anybody that's but he will reach out to the ones that are relevant for the kind of person that will use this specific plug in, and we then ask them to create their own presets. And that's where you end up with the categories of different artists' names in those plugins. So in that case, yes, you are dealing with that person working on presets in their room. So if it says Andrew Sheps, it's done in the ceiling space of his cottage in Worcestershire. It's a lovely sounding space. He's got really nice setup, he's got pmc's, the room sounds amazing. That's where those presets come from. And you know a lot of people will say well, it's Andrew Shepp's preset must be amazing, yes, for him. For you, it's a starting point. It's a starting point. Take that great starting point from that dude with a lot of experience, and then save as your name and tweak the hell out of it so that it works perfectly for you. They are a starting point. They are a shortcut. They save you hours upon hours of working out how to get what somebody else has already done for you. Yeah. I tell my clients that get my custom presets made. You know, this is a starting point. You can use this happily for many years, and some do that client's come back five, six, seven years still using that preset you made, or that stack or whatever. I'm like, really, I wasn't a very good engineer back then. For whatever. If you're booking, that's great. But yeah, I tell people like, if you're only going to do one thing, get one preset that's EQ to you. Everything's dialed into you, and now you have an awesome stepping off point to copy or make a duplicate from and go crazy. Now now you can always return to home and get back to a starting point that works well. And so these presets that you guys have designed. Yeah, they're not customed to tune to eq or whatever exactly to that to your voice. But you're knowing that the parameters and the ranges of the parameters and such are in musical or tasteful zones, right you know, yes, yes, perfect. I couldn't put that better myself. I'm going to use that on my next Facebook argument, George. So we create these presets so that and by the way, let me say, Michael, not everybody does good presets. I can tell you in very big company US do I use and their presets are horrendous. So you guys really do put in the effort. Sorry, go ahead, No, we really do. It's like, but what we try and do is we try and make sure that we're giving people a starting point the saves some time and also take into accounts. Presets are there to give you an idea of what the potential power of the plugin is. So a preset might not if you go through the presets, it might not be what you're after right now, but if you use the preset browser and just flip through them, you're going to find that, oh my god, it can do that fantastic save that for later, I save presets that I want to get back to with my initials, and that way I can go through them and I can type in MPa and it brings up and it goes, okay, cool, I need to get back and mess with that one or that one or that idea. It's funny, isn't it. We talk about precepts and things, but it's also choices of microphones and preamps as well. Like I was doing a session this morning and I said, what do you want? Do you want me to use the you know, a large diaphragm mike with ten seventy three or do you want me to use forty one six with the grace? And they're like, oh, forty one six with the grace. So that's it's kind of like an analog preset, if that makes any sense. Yeah, as long as you know what you used, Like if you have to come back to that project again, that's if you've got more than one chain, you do have to do the extra documentations as a voice actor to make sure that do you know what though, you don't, George, because that bloody for one six there's not a way you're going to miss that one. Well, no, that mic is distinctive. But yeah, no, it's it's very The more the more chains you have to remember and pre set in store, a little bit more of a Responsibility're going to have to keep track of that later down the road, and you got to pick up that year later. Just don't, don't. I like, I mean, having two distinct options is smart. Having seventeen variations maybe too much to keep track of, you know. So it's sorry about that to have this mic and preamp as a combo you use. I have clients that have two mics, two prams, or three mics two pramps or what do they want to do? Well? They want to hear every combination of those three mics and those two I'm like, no, you don't. You don't need to hear and use all three combos of every permutation. Once you have two chains or three chains, maybe that are like go to is just go to it. You just find things that you like. Yeah, that work. They are convenient, like the the technically work together. They silently work together. You know, they're packaged. Right, there's gear fomo, man, it's fomo. People are like, there's something new, there's something new. What can I make it better? I'm like, I get it. I get and this is kind of why. I mean, obviously we've talked about creative access subscriptions from Waves before. One of the beautiful things about a subscription is, you know, if you're on, say, for example, the Essential, you've got one hundred and ten plugins that you can mess with, and then, rather than actually buying them, if you decide no, I don't need those plugins, then you know, cancel the subscription and go and buy two or three of them instead. It's totally up to you. Take a mega demo. Yeah, pretty much the ultimate demo of every plug in. Yeah, there is a very very good argument for having an overwhelming amount of tools and finding that it degrades your work because you can't think about what to use at the time. I mean, you know, a perfect example is, and I'll take this back to this is two thousand and eight. Two thousand and eight, I get a phone call from a mate of mine, Brian Gold, who owns a post production studio house in Detroit, Detroit, you know him very well. He's a great day. Yeah, so and he rings me and he goes, mate, we need Mercury Bundle for all the rooms. I'm like, I'm happy to help. How many rooms you got right now? And he goes thirteen. So he had thirteen rooms at Gold Sound. At that point in time, he had just put in de Commands, Icon consoles plus HD six pro tools. Was this when the Mercury bundle had the TDM pracing and then the native praising, Oh yeah, get don't spoil my story. And Brian says to me, He goes, so, IM going to need Mercury bundles for all of those, And I said, mate, for that, I will personally fly in install them all, give you a huge hug, and then get drunk. So Brian then drops the you know, the bill on this, which is you know, at that time TDM Mercury was thirteen, four hundred and fifty dollars each, so and he bought thirteen of them, and then he rang me and said give me another one. I'm going to have a floating one. So there's fourteen times thirteen thousand. You do the maw. So I go into the studios and by this time I'd known him and his team for a while. Lovely people, Brian's still a really good friend of mine. And I go in and I install these Mercury bundles, and I go, okay, I'm going to come back in three months. I come back in three months. These guys, after I've taken them through all of these plugins before, they were still using the four plugins that they were used to that they'd been using for the last two or three years. So there is a point where you have to look at this and go, okay, how many tools do I need? And which ones am I going to use? And is too many degrading my work or improving my work? You're going to use the ones to give you a sound you want, the sound that you want in the sound that you like. Yeah, okay, So I get one plug in and the plug in would be game Box. That's it ivox. It's It's one of the most epically simple and productive plugins you can buy for a simpleton. I want to go simple. The pro Audio Suite and Austrian audio recorded using Source Connect, edited by Andrew Peaters and mixed by Voodoo Radio Imaging takes the pot from George the Tech would don't forget to subscribe to the show and joining the conversation on our Facebook group to leave a comment, suggest a topic, or just say today, drop us a note at our website,