Below you will find a comparison of 7 10 popular brickwall limiters with similar settings. I’m not comparing which gets loudest, I’m comparing which can cleanly take a few dB off the top.
Which one sounds the best or has the least artifacts?
The source is a MIDI pattern played through Steven Slate Drums. 24 bit, 44.1kHz. A different limiter plugin was applied with both threshold and ceiling set to -6.5dBFS. Note that Ozone does not allow a ceiling below -5dBFS.
You can download the files. Images can be enlarged.
Head over to HERE and grab the POD Farm 2.5 trial. The trial version gives you a taste of what POD Farm can do with a great assortment of amps and effects. When you install you get POD Farm you get the standalone version, plugin with everything and POD Farm Elements which is an individual plugin for distortions, amps, reverbs etc. Great for mixing.
Included with Line 6 POD Farm Free
Guitar Amps
1964 Blackface ‘Lux
Brit J 800
Power Amp
Bass Amps
1989 Eighties
1968 Flip Top
Cabinets
1×12 Blackface ‘Lux
4×12 Brit Celest T-75s
1×15 Flip Top
4×10 Silvercone
Preamps
American Classic
Console
Distortions
Facial Fuzz
Screamer
Dynamics
Compressor
Noise Gate
Vetta Comp
Volume Pedal
Filters
Sub Octaves
Modulations
Opto Tremolo
Phaser
Delays
Analog Delay w/Modulation
Digital Delay
Reverbs
Cavernous
Standard Spring
Wahs
Vetta Wah
Weeper
As you can see, you get a lot to play with. Additionally, you can insert these effects in any order in the chain as well as multiples of most up to 20 fx. When you buy POD Farm or POD Farm Platinum you get a ton more toys to play with.
I wrote this article for the latest Revolution Audio newsletter. Check them out if you’re looking for recording gear in Canada.
Vocal Processing And Mixing Tips
Last time I shared some tips for recording great vocals, now lets get them sitting right with the rest of the track.
Cleanup – Before anything, clean up the vocal tracks. Go through and trim the silence around each phrase. Remove any noise, thumps, clicks, pops and gasps. Fade in or out on each edit.
Pitch Correction – Gentle pitch correction with software like Melodyne is a big part in getting that professional sounding vocal we all strive for in our home studio productions. Be careful with this! Doing it right takes time and practice. Over tuned vocals are about as bad as out of tune vocals (you can hear both on American Idol).
EQ – There are no rules and every voice is different but here are some starting points. A high-pass filter (low cut) can be used to clean up the very lows (below 100Hz). 200-600Hz can be gently boosted or cut depending on the voice to add thickness or compensate for proximity. 1kHz-3kHz is usually where the clarity of the vocals is. Above that is brightness, bite, air but look out for sibilance. How much you can boost here depends on the song.
Compression – When it comes to controlling vocal dynamics, using two compressors doing less individually often yields the most transparent result. Use a compressor with fast attack and high ratio (10:1) working just on the peaks, ignoring everything else. The second compressor is set with a 4:1 ratio, a slower attack and release and threshold set so it is always compressing about 2-4dB.
Reverb – Reverb is an effect you’ll want on a separate channel (aux track in Pro Tools, FX Channel in Cubase) rather than having it right on the vocal track. Use a send to add the reverb to the vocals. The reverb time should be related to the tempo of the song, it can really clutter the mix if it’s not. Hall and Plate are the most common types of reverb for vocals. Shaping the reverb sound with EQ is recommended.
Automation – Automating the volume level of the vocals is absolutely essential to getting the vocal to sit right where you want it throughout the song. Automating the reverb send for the vocal will allow you to have just the right amount at any time. You can also automate effects like chorus and delays for the vocals to keep things interesting through the song.
iZotope Nectar – A great all-in-one tool for vocal processing is iZotope Nectar. Eleven effects in one plugin including EQ, Compression, Auto and Manual Pitch Correction, reverb, delay and more.
SoundToys is giving out a very cool audio destroying plugin called Devil-Loc. It’s based on the classic Shure M62 Level Loc processor, but more extreme, much more extreme. This thing is nasty and awesome.
This plugin is free for a limited time, this is the last week, so get it right now. A Deluxe version with more features is coming.
Formats: PC VST, RTAS. Mac VST, RTAS, AU
Examples
Drum beats processed only with Devil Loc presets. Source is Addictive Drums.
Essentially a distorting compressor but so much more, it’s really quite simple but also a bit supernatural. Because the release time of the compression is effected by the input level (like the Level-Loc) it’s a bit hard to predict exactly what will happen the first time you work with it. Luckily with just two knobs, you can find the magic spot for your track fairly quickly and you’ll be going for that sound more and more. Don’t be fooled by it’s simple front panel, this plug-in has a lot more cool sounds than you’d expect out of two knobs. Get crushing kick drums, to almost rhythmic level sweeps with the crazing sucking compression, to blitzed out blasting beat loops. Drive it hard and you get straight hardware sounding break-up and drive. It’s a devil in disguise, and the devil’s in the details, and the devil made us do it and all those other devil references.
Devil-Loc Deluxe. Coming April 2011
To take things beyond the hardware that inspired it and give you even more creative flexibility, Devil-Loc Deluxe adds a “Darkness” control for tone, switchable slow or fast release times and the ability to mix the original back in right on the front panel. The addition of these controls opens up the sonic palette immensely. Dark thundering drums, to driven lo-fi loops, and more, and the mix control saves all that tedious routing and lets you automate mix to keep the Devil from taking over the soul of your tracks. This time, evil is good.
A Bit of History
The Shure M62 Level-Loc was designed by Shure to be a leveling amplifier mostly for mics. The concept was it would keep an even level (locked level) once it hit a certain input so you wouldn’t get “fade outs or blasting”. It was super simple with only a switch for three “distance” settings based on how far from the mic you were. The M62V upped the control a bit by adding an input level knob. However, the reason it became famous was not because it did a good job of leveling, it may have, but largely thanks to SoundToys user Tchad Blake and his desire to push, abuse, and do deliciously evil things to his tracks. He discovered that pushing the Level-Loc gave you gritty, dirty, unusual compression that made drums gigantic and nasty. Both of which are good things. So we’ve taken that concept and dropped it in the simple two control Devil-Loc. Then we’ve taken it further than the original hardware with the Devil-Loc Deluxe.
Similar to the CLA collection stuff I posted about a while ago, if you head over to the Waves site you can read about what’s going with the Eddie Kramer Signature Collection effects. On that page there are some sketches of what the concept for processing and signal chain. I thought they were pretty interesting so I’ve posted some of them below.
A while ago I found this page on the Waves site explaining the concept of the Chris Lord-Alge Signature series effects. On that page there are some signal chain diagrams showing what’s going on, if you can’t afford the collection, these may come in handy coming up with similar results. In any event, you may find them interesting. Because I’m feeling lazy today, I’m going to paste his comments on each plugin too.
Click to enlarge images.
Let’s talk about each plugin, starting with CLA Guitars.
The unique thing about CLA Guitars is that I made it for the guitar player that wants to sit late at night, plug in his direct box, and instantly have three choices of sound. Especially with so many people recording DI signals now, there’s that instant gratification, to take a DI signal and automatically get a sound. And the re-amping makes it completely unique, and the EQ I picked is really conducive to guitar. The EQ, compression, and the way the delays are setup, it’s like, the perfect guitar setup. read a whole lot more inside
