Studio Secrets: From Microphone Mastery to Mixing Marvels

In this episode of The Pro Audio Suite, brought to you by Tribooth and Austrian Audio, we dive deep into a fascinating discussion about microphones, mixing secrets, and the unexpected virtues of parallel processing in audio production. AP shares a surprising discovery he made with the Austrian AUdio OC 18 and his SSL2 interface, demonstrating how versatile equipment can mimic much pricier setups. The gang also discusses trends in vocal processing, the move away from flat-sounding mics, and the latest hot trends, from hot chicken to air fryers.

Robbo ventures into the realms of advanced compression techniques, exploring how parallel compression (a mixing technique used widely in music circles) can add some punch to your voice recordings. Whether you're a newbie or a seasoned pro, this episode is packed with insights and laughs, offering valuable tips and tricks that could transform your next audio project.

Key Highlights:

• Robbo’s mic discovery and its impact on sound quality.
• Deep dive into parallel processing and its uses beyond drums.
• Advanced compression tactics and settings for optimal sound manipulation.

See Robbo's Parallel VO Compression Examples here:

https://theproaudiosuite.com/season-7-bonus-content#episode-17

A big shout out to our sponsors, Austrian Audio and Tri Booth. Both these companies are providers of QUALITY Audio Gear (we wouldn't partner with them unless they were), so please, if you're in the market for some new kit, do us a solid and check out their products, and be sure to tell em "Robbo, George, Robert, and AP sent you"... As a part of their generous support of our show, Tri Booth is offering $200 off a brand-new booth when you use the code TRIPAP200. So get onto their website now and secure your new booth...

https://tribooth.com/

And if you're in the market for a new Mic or killer pair of headphones, check out Austrian Audio. They've got a great range of top-shelf gear.. 

https://austrian.audio/

Hunter S Thompson

TPAS April 29 tighter edit, Robbo's mix

[00:00:00] And welcome to another Pro Audio Suite. Thanks to Tribooth, the golden handcuffs can be released as you travel with your Tribooth. And don't forget the code TRIPAP200 to get 200 off your Tribooth. Today we're going to be talking about, well, a few tips that we've learned over the years. probably should kick this off because I, uh, had a, made a discovery, [00:01:00] um, this week. Because I had a session, it was actually late last week, come to think of it. But it was a session I was doing with, uh, in the morning. And in the afternoon, as I just shut down the studio, I got an email saying, Oh, can you redo this line?

And I thought, well, I can't be bothered firing it up again. So what I'll do is I'll use my laptop. through the SSL to out of the booth because I've got a mic in there that goes through there straight to the laptop. Yeah, firing everything up. And I've actually set it up with the 4k button switched in. So which mic is this again?

The OC 18 OC 18. Okay. Got it. Yeah. So, I sent the file off and then I got the reply of the email saying, if you changed your, if you change your settings or something and uh because if you have, I like it better. Can you continue using whatever you're using now? Okay. So, what I I'd realize there's two things at play here.

One was I've been playing around with uh the 41 six and the OC 818 because the [00:02:00] OC 818 was going through the Neve, the 1073, and the 41 six was going through the grace and I just changed them around just for an experiment and I forgot to change them back. So he was getting the 41 six through the name.

So it was a bit more midi full. Yeah, creamy, chocolatey, whatever. Right. Um, but I changed them back the next time I said, I'll send you two files. I'll send you what you like today and I'll send you what you historically liked before. Uh, we've 41 six with the grace. But having said that the OC 18. Through the SSL2 with the 4K button pressed in.

Sounds remarkably like a 41 six through the grace. So they stand in for each other. Extra high end

boost. It's

bizarre. But the thing is, I was kind of thinking, okay, so I see the stuff on these threads on Facebook all the time. Should I get this mic? Should I get that mic? What should I do here? Which one should I get?

And it's always like, get [00:03:00] the, um, you know, the 41 one six and a TLM one oh three. My tip is get an OC 18 and an SLSL two. And then you've got both. You've got a large diaphragm without the 4k pressed in. And then you've got this hyper sort of 41, six sound with the 4k, but it's hard to beat.

Yeah. It's hard to beat the versatility with that setup and well, not, it's not hard to beat it, but it's hard to do it that simply, you know, to have a single push button that essentially changes mics, you know, and then, and then with the button in there and then with the, yeah, with the, with the pattern switch on the OC 18, you have this proximity effect.

Yeah. Changes, you know, you can change, you know, you're, you're good to go. into

hypercardioid and it'd be pretty Yeah. But this thing, this is, this is it.

This is the OC 18 with the 4K button pressed in. And you can hear, like, it's really, really cutting. It does sound like a Well, to me, it sounds I gotta say, I mean I'll bet, I'll bet one of the

problems is you get too much into the [00:04:00] OC 18 because it doesn't have the long tube.

So really, it's like you want to be here, but if you get away from the OC 18 with the same distance that you would be from the 4 41 6 and you put it in hypercardioid and pop in that 4k extra, you know, like mid range, high end. Yeah. And yeah, you'll be, you'll be getting to that cut through anything sound.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I think we are so accustomed to not a flat sounding mic, right? Like we, the sound of voiceover is not a flat mic. Cause we, we moved away from a flat mic when we left ribbon mics, you know? It's the

same with our food. Everyone wants like overly salted food. Yeah, or spicy.

Dave's hot chicken.

Hot chicken this, hot chicken that. You guys get the hot chicken trend in Australia? Oh, we get everything, yeah. Hot,

hot, hot. The big, the big trend I reckon here, well, probably everywhere in the world is air [00:05:00] fryers at the moment if you're talking food, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The air fryer. I got one in my garbage.

I don't want my air fried.

Well, that's cool. So, so that's your kind of, I mean, you know, that's a pretty nice secret weapon. Now, I'm wondering what you would get out of the CC8 if you did the same exact experiment. That could be interesting. I should try that one. For travel. Uh, if you wanted to have a travel,

uh, solution, yeah, but I've got the CC, the CC eight with the CC eight was sounding a lot

like your OC eight one eight when it was in the porta booth.

Wasn't it?

It was in the portabooth. Yeah. In the portabooth and the car in the car and it sounded a lot like the

OC eight one eight, which is like crazy.

Yeah. It's very cool. I like it. You should change your name from Mr. Big balls to Mr. Rigg. I reckon. Okay. Mr. Rigg. Mr.

Is that your

tip? That's my tip. I like, I reckon that should have

been your tip. That, that car one, that was, that still gets me.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's amazing.

And I, I did send that file off to [00:06:00] a guy called Chris Gates, who he's a bit of a fan of the show. He's an audio engineer here in Melbourne and he. I love the guy, but he's always cutting you off. Gatesy. Oh, there

you

can see the Chris

Expander out there.

Shut the gate, the horse is bolted.

Yeah, that's right.

Come on, Robert, give us this. Give us the source. Can I shit?

I was hoping you wouldn't going to call me. Give us a source

connect one.

Yeah, just avoid airports. There's your tip. Traveling too much. I don't, what have I, um, ah, now I'm full screen. No, the pressure's on. I'll tell you what, I'll, I'll

throw one out there and, and, and since I was going to do a plugin one, but listening to AP, um, Because the idea of this was we were going to do one about voiceover that we use every day.[00:07:00]

Um, so there's one that, there's one that I use every day. That's probably a, it's, it's a musical thing, but I, and I don't know how much it's used in voiceover. Um, but a parallel, but a parallel bus on your voiceover. So when, when you're, when you're mixing something with voiceover, you get your, your voiceover set up nicely.

Um, so that it's, it's, sorry, hang on one second. My, this is one of

those things where I have very, very little experience with, which is parallel processing. Yeah. I've done

a lot

of

parallel drum. I

I'm very new to the, to the concept of parallel processing.

So, so basically I'll go back. Cause I thought Pro Tools had stopped.

That's all. Um, uh, I'll go back to the beginning. So mine's more of a musical thing. Mine's something that musicians use a lot. And, and George was, sorry, Robert was saying before, like [00:08:00] drums is a big thing where, where musical mixes will use parallel compression. But the idea is that you get your, your, For me anyway, you get your voiceover set up nicely so it's nicely compressed and sounding with a nice EQ.

But then what you do is you send that track to, it can either be another track or a bus, whatever way you want to work. For me it's a bus because I've usually got layers of voiceover so I just send it to a bus. And on that bus you heavily compress. And you can manipulate ReaCue to whatever you want to do to get it to mix in.

But the idea is that once you've got it set up and you've got that heavy compression going, you then drop that signal down, but then mix it back in so that it's just It's not there up front, but it's just making that voiceover lift and it's giving it that enough kick to punch through the music and sound effects and everything else that's going on.

But because [00:09:00] that original signal is still fairly dynamic, you've got this other compressed one that's mixing in underneath that gives it enough punch to punch through. Does that make sense? I get it, I get it

intellectually, I just, it's one of those like, it's like a tool, that's always been in the toolbox, but I've been afraid to Open it and use it.

I don't know why. I just, I don't have that experience. You are doing

parallel gating right now, except one of your gates is set to nothing. Yeah, that's true.

I am mixing a mix of wet and dry. So, that's essentially what I'm, I guess that's what parallel processing is, right? It's pretty much. Some of the processing, some of the not.

There's, there's those who argue that it's kind of like almost the same thing as just getting the right settings on the, Compressor and I've messed around with it And it seems like you can kind of get the same stuff But I would say that a parallel setup is way easier to dial in I can And you can get like some pretty, especially on drums, where like nothing ever falls too far away, [00:10:00] but it feels like you're never squashing the top.

That's right. And it is just easy to get like, I've really only used it on drums, um, but most compressors these days, most plugins, even like the LA 2A copy of this, that, or the other thing, Almost every plug in manufacturer now puts a blend knob on the end of their compressors, it's so popular. So it used to be this trick, you'd set up the same processing on two channels, and you'd have to get the same latency so that they phase perfectly, and now it's like one knob.

And most, most compressors do this. I mean, I'm used to

parallel processing, quote unquote, of being something we use in, in, when we're dealing with reverb or delay. Because, of course, you need to have Dry, or if it's only reverb, there will be insanity, right? It would be unintelligible. It'd be Nick Cave. So I'm very used to Did you say it'd be Nick Cave?

I said it'd be Nick Cave. Nick Cave is, he's super, super wet. [00:11:00] Right, right. Uh,

reverb. His stuff is, am I right, Andrew? Like

Is it Nick Cave? In what respect do you mean with Nick Cave? He's got a bunch of effects and stuff. Their mixes are like super reverb y. Super wet. Oh, God, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought you were making a

joke because it sounds like he's in a cave.

Maybe that's why he's

in a church. You should do a cave

recording, Robert. Um, so, um, yeah, so overly wet would be, uh, would be, uh, too much. So, so that I understand, I understand the concept. And so when we're talking about processing, we either talk about what? Serial or parallel. Is that where the, are that the two versions of Waze?

Technically, yeah, it's like insert

or aux send return is the way I think of it. But that's what's interesting now because a

lot of insert plugins have a blend knob or a dry wet. Now they're really acting more like a parallel processor. Yeah, I

don't, I don't find that quite as effective. And I, Robert said that before, and I would agree with him.

I, I, there's something about the blend. [00:12:00] I think you can be more accurate with, with a, with it coming from another bus. You can, and it's easier to, if you've got a couple of, Plugins in blend mode, um, it's easier if it's on a separate bus, it's actually easier to, you know, if you need to, to ride it a little bit, it's easier to do that too, I suppose.

It's easier to control. Maybe it's easier to automate. It's on a fader, I mean,

it's, it's nice to have it on a hundred millimeter fader than a knob. I'll say that. But unless you're doing a setup where you're doing one heavy and one mild compression. But if you're doing one, like, the reason why I think it's less impressive on the, um, the, the blend knob, because most people set the compressor to not be too heavy.

And then they only blend in a little of the straight, but really if you wanted to do more obvious parallel compression, you would put your compressor at, you know, 10 to one with a low threshold and crush it by 20 [00:13:00] decibels. And then you'd only blend in like 10, 5 percent of that compressed signal, that completely crushed signal.

And the majority of it would be the dry. And then you'd have a natural sound with the, like that benefit of like, it just doesn't go down too far. Um, I'll tell you what I'll do. Do you play around with

frequencies when you, when you're doing this stuff though? Because I, you know, like when you sort of get the stereo split and you're looking for gaps in frequencies where you can put a, you know, an EQ'd voice where it will sit and pop out.

Is that what you're doing with this as well? Especially

in radio imaging, I'll play with the EQ on that squashed parallel bus. Absolutely. Yeah.

And the parallel bus itself will just like seem like you crush it enough, it'll seem like it loses low end. Because that's where like a ton of the energy is. So when the signal comes in and your brain is going like oh, I'm ready for that low end and the compressor goes nope, you're not going to get the volume.

And then you hear the, [00:14:00] so compressors have a, can have an EQ like effect. I'll tell you what I can

do. AP and I just finished a re launch package for a station in Singapore called 1FM. And we did a, we did a monster re launch promo, um, sort of, uh, you know, spruiking that the re launch was coming. And it's got this big operatic music happening underneath it and I've added in, you know, lots of impacts and whooshes and stuff to give it some movement and some, you know, Typical FM Gravitas.

Um, but what I might do is, I'll put up a mix, I'll put a link in this video if you're on YouTube or in the show notes if you're listening to the audio one, I'll put it up on our website. Um, and I'll do a mix, I'll put the full mix and then I'll do a mix without the parallel bus. Uh, Uh, AP's voice and, and you'll just see how, how much it, it's [00:15:00] still there.

You can still hear it, but the, the parallel bus, just when, when something impacts and hits, it's still sitting there. It's still right there in your face. That's the best way

to explain it is to literally, I was going to ask you if you had examples of, of, of where they're being, but that would be a cool idea.

I'll paste that up. Yeah. Yeah.

The, the, the parallel compression thing is much more. Um, kind of known in, in drums, I'd say then using it on voice.

I I'm sort of, it's something I haven't really talked about and I, and I do a podcast, um, on radio imaging with the guys from imaging blueprint who we've had on this show before.

Um, but it's something that we never talk about. And I, and I was kind of interested to know, is it just me that does it on voice or is it, is it, is, is it sort of. I mean, I can't imagine, I don't really use it in, in commercial work, I suppose, unless I kind of, you know, unless you get to that point where you think, shit, this needs a bit more kick, but it's certainly not [00:16:00] on, on everything, but in it, I reckon I can't think of too many imaging projects that I've done.

Done lately that I haven't used a parallel voice bus on, so. Yeah. Well, I'm in the comments. In the comments. If you use it, let me know. Yeah, yeah.

I, I'm much more familiar with the concept of serial compression, in fact. Yeah. I, I don't even know if I still have it. I wish. I hope I do. Um, but I had this awesome, um.

Compressor called the FMR Audio RNC, which stands for Really Nice Compressor. It's like

a little third of a rack space deal, and they're like 200 bucks, but they punch above their weight. I mean, those are from like the early 2000s or something.

Yes, yes, yes. So I used to have one of these and I had this in my mix bus quote unquote on my I used to do production mixing on set on film sets.

So this was on your stereo

master? Is that what you're [00:17:00] saying? Yeah,

I had on my stereo master. That's a mono compressor. Did you have two of them?

I can do stereo. Yep, it's got stereo, it's got two in, two out. Oh shit,

I didn't remember that. Oh yeah, there you go. Cool.

Two in, two out, and a sidechain. Yeah. So, um, so I would run that on my stereo bus, and then I would just press super nice, this button right here.

And, what super nice does, and I think they explain it a bit, a little bit. RNC achieves high performance at a low cost by using a microprocessor to replicate or replace discrete side chain components. Um, so instead of having a lot of discrete parts, right? Resistors, diodes, things that make like an LA 2A.

Amazing. Um, with chunks of software, thereby reducing the component cost. It still processes the main audio and analog, avoiding the problems associated with digital audio conversion. Even the problem of scratchy pots are avoided. No audio flows through the pots. Um, and so, and basically it's using [00:18:00] VCAs.

Internally, right? Yeah. So it's this really interesting design of combining digital and analog, but what was cool about super nice

is the really nice button. Do does it change? So what super nice did

was, um, I did some reading about this while, when I first bought it, so 20 years ago, but what it did was you're, you're sequencing a series of compressors, so, and they're all at different ratios, right?

So you can hit it harder and harder and harder. And it kind of hides the, um, coloring that you get from over compressing, you know, because st Doesn't that sound like a knee staging?

Doesn't that sound like a knee where it, knee, I guess it does sound like a knee.

Yeah. Gets you into

it gradually instead of having just like a, like a point, it curves into the compression eventually where it's like flat.

It's kind of a big complicated way of saying i's like, you do a soft knee.

I mean, uh, I, I [00:19:00] guess. Talking, talking about radio imaging again, but for me, like, I don't have on, on my voice on Andrew's main voice track. If we go back to that promo that you'll hear an example of, um, there's not one compressor.

There's, there's a sequencer plugin. So it comes in and it goes through, uh, uh, the first one is a CLA two way, which basically just takes everything that's sort of too sort of loud. Brings that down. Yeah. Then a bit of EQ and some other processing, but then it'll go through, um, the, um, Oh God, what's it called?

Uh, another waves compressor. Anyway, it goes through that, but then that's got a bit of a faster

compressor maybe.

Uh, yeah. Sometimes I'll use the Renaissance, but the main one I use, I can see. See it, it's, it's, um, I'll put it in the show notes. Um, but it's got a faster attack and, and, and a, and a and a quicker release.

So, yeah. Then that's just dealing with anything that's still a little too [00:20:00] hot and sort of bringing that down. And then in the, on the master bus for the voice where everything comes together, all, all the processing and, and, and the, yeah. parallel bus and everything, there's a bus compressor on there as well.

So, so you sort of, it's the same idea by the sounds of it as what you're talking about, George is, it's not just a compressor, it's a series of compressors that give you a bit more control as you're shaping that, that waveform, I guess. Yeah. Cause I guess the guys, a lot of guys in

music, they use like a 10, 70, uh, 10, um, LA to 1176, 1176.

They'll use them both because they both do different things and they'll stack them together. But they're

serialized. They're one and it's going through one and then it's going through the next.

So I don't know if this is still going on with mastering, but um, at least 10 years ago, mastering engineers were starting to just clip the ADD converter just a little bit and clip this other thing just a little bit [00:21:00] and they weren't even, they were just literally purposely clipping things by half a DB.

Yeah. And that's such a thing now

that there are literally clippers. Yeah. Yeah. There are plugins that are clippers.

Yeah. And, and also I remember the first time that I had anything mastered. So I did this recording on my cassette A track, mixed it down to dat. I was interning at, at what was it called? The classic digital mastering, which was funny because they did a lot of classical music too.

But, um, so it's like, you know, like, They did a free mastering session for this thing. And the guy loads it into sonic solutions and then just, he's like, you know, he finds the peak and he's like, whatever, we're going to bump. Like I was, I hit it perfectly. I was like zero on the debt, you know? He's like, whatever, we're going to raise it up by like three or six.

I'm like, you're going to clip it. And he's like, that's fine. They'll just be loud. That's it. Yeah. Just like, like there was no L one back then. It was just like, no,

there was no maximizer at the top. Yeah. Okay. No, I is [00:22:00] one, um, the com, the compressor I like on ap. The second one, by the way, is the DPR 4 0 2, the blue one with the red LED lights that sort of go vertically.

And you probably don't know it's in the wave. No, that's

one of their newer ones. It's not an emulation or, or is it the b Yeah, it's an emulation.

It is an emulation of hardware. 'cause I used to have a hardware one in a studio I used to work in.

Yeah, it's what's what's the name of that company? bb. It's not BBE, but bb.

Yeah, I think it is. BBE. No, it's not BBE because BBE makes the exciter that's like audio crack and it ruins your mix. I'm just, I'm looking in my audio suite, looking in my audio suite plugins and it doesn't say BBE, DPR, or anything like that. It takes

your

daughter out on a date. Here we go, hang on. Oh, I can't, can I share my screen?

No, I can't. Oh, I think

you can.

Hang on, it's coming up. My poor old Mac's got Pro Tools running and four source connections going and God knows what else. It's [00:23:00] desperately trying to open the plug in. I was trying to show it earlier. Your Mac

is buying fans off Amazon right now. Exactly.

Well, well, well, we were getting onto the tangent of knee, so I just wanted to show you.

Oh, you got

it? Hang on. Hang on. Let me go to that. This could, this could blow everything up, you know. Here we go.

If, if, if the, if the episode suddenly finishes, you'll know why. Andrew,

just hit the end, the end thing. And

if I go present, share screen. Here we go. Share screen. Sharing screen is easiest with two monitors.

Yep. Share screen. And then you have to choose the window or browser tab. Okay, and then window, let's just go here, share. There we go. Can you see that? Yep, it's working. I just have to add it to the show.

Hang on. There you go. There you go. There it is. Ooh,

DPR.

Yeah, that's the name of them. So,

no, no, BSS. Is that the real name?

BSS is, it's not BBE, it's BSS. BSS. There you go. So, so for, [00:24:00] for AP on this, I, I have a, a sort of a bit of a fast, well, a reasonably fast attack, um, and, and a similar release, but, but if you were watching this working for AP 3 dB gain reduction light would be blinking sort of, you know, indiscriminately on and off.

It's not working very hard, but it's just cleaning up those, those things that are a bit higher. Which means that as you, as you work your way down the stack of compressors, you can actually compress a bit harder. Because there's nothing that's catching that's being compressed really hard, you know, so you sort of, you gradually leveling it out, which means that by the time you get to a limiter, you can actually limit really hard, because there's no peaks that are being caught and squashed radically.

It's all sort of being just evenly squashed nicely. So, um, that's the thought process behind that. So I was going to show, uh, go ahead, go Robert.

I was going to say, here's a setting that no one thinks about that I think can [00:25:00] make a big difference with some of the really high end compressors, like the George Massenburg.

Um, you see every compressor probably has an input, a threshold, attack, release, and output, maybe. But you don't see hysteresis on a lot of compressors.

Now you have to explain that now. What does that mean? You've opened that can of worms. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think it basically has to do with like having two thresholds.

I'll make myself comfortable

for this. Yeah, sit back.

One threshold to trigger the compression, but the other threshold that it has to maybe follow below before it, you know, compresses again. I have to re remember this, because I don't own one with hysteresis. I mean, I see this knob on plugins. I

see, I see Certain plug ins, a compressor will have a hysteresis.

No,

I think logic hysteresis

hysteresis hysteresis. I've never known I'll go with you He hold my beer says [00:26:00] Robert

As he dives into this subject

So it has

two thresholds of essentially a low threshold and a high threshold Right.

I think so. I think it's something like that because because I believe you can also have it In a, the same word, but with, uh, with compressor, with gates, you can have it too. What's the wave

plugin that does that?

Is it the MV one or something that's got a high and a low threshold? It sounds like the

MV one there, there was one that one that Bob, uh, there was one that had a whole bunch of thresholds. It was, was kind of like what the RNC does. Um Mm-Hmm. . That was back in the day and it was that mastering engineer from Florida that put it out.

MB

two, an expensive piece of hardware, I'm assuming. Here

you go. Hang on. I

was a plugin.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Hang on. Let me tell me if this is the one you're thinking of. Is that with a high threshold?

Well, that definitely has a high and a low level. [00:27:00] Seems and that's it. Well, it's at a low level. It's sucking it up. Is this an expander and a compressor? It's, yeah, it sort of seems to be both in the one. But that's why I'm wondering whether that's what Robert's talking about. Is that the, is

that what you're thinking of?

Um, if I can find, here, I'll show you a picture of the definite compressor I'm thinking of. Um, because, GML, let's see, I gotta spell it out. This has become

like a really deep dive on compressors, actually. It has, hasn't it? It

really has, yeah. And it's made it nice. I'm looking across here, looking at my 2254 and thinking It doesn't have a history.

It's got a lot of stuff in it. No, it doesn't, but it's got lots of different, um, a couple of different limiter, limiter, limiter recovery, fast attack.

Is that a Neve thing?

Release hysteresis. It has to do with the release timing. So here's, um, if I was to, I will find it. Let's see here. [00:28:00] I'm zoomed in too much.

Okay, so how do I share my screen now? And bottom. Present. Present arms. Share screen.

If Robert disappears, we know why. Share

screen. Share screen. And. I guess we'll just do this. Nope, I'll do that. That'll be easiest. This one,

here we go. So add it to the stage and here it is. Here

we go. Do you, uh, do you, do you see that?

Yep. Yep. And, and if I, uh, zoom in on this thing. So let's see here. View zoom in. How far can we zoom in? It's such a thing. It's called

shortcut. Do you know that? Don't you?

There you, I I just did it. I didn't, I think it was . So you go, um, timing, release, hysteresis. And you notice it has a setting here and a setting there.

And it has to do, so, maybe, in here, let's see, we're going to find So George

Mastenberg is probably one of the most renowned [00:29:00] hardware designers of the And what is that, like a

4, 000 compressor, probably? Yeah, I mean,

everything he made is absolute, you know, money is no object.

I mean,

check this shit

out, Crest, Crest Factor.

Crest Factor. Timing in release histories is to precisely control dynamic features of musical performance when we would arbitrarily use your familiar features such as They don't tell us what it is, they just say it's cool stuff. So Maybe he doesn't really want you to know.

Yeah, probably. Doesn't want to give the game away.

Go and spend 4, 000 and buy one, Robert, and then come back to us. Exactly. I'll expense it. Yeah, I'll expense it, no problem. Source Elements won't mind. You just won a couple of awards, you'll be right.

Well, when you were talking about me, I just wanted to show you this compressor that I probably don't understand how to use, but I've been using for 15 years.

And it's the, it's the Dynamics plugin called AU Dynamics Processor. So this is the plugin that comes on Apple. It's the

Apple plugin. It's the

Apple Dynamics plugin. And the [00:30:00] thing about this plugin is, is it, it doesn't have a ratio. It has a ceiling control. And I still don't understand. So it's like a limiter?

Yeah, that's a limiter thing. Yeah, it's very strange, but the bottom line is when I use it A ceiling

and a threshold can be similar, but if you think of it, if you have infinity to one ratio and a threshold, then your threshold is your ceiling.

Oh, okay. Okay. Now you've confused me, but I'll believe you. If the ratio is infinity to one,

meaning you shall not pass, pass my threshold.

Yeah,

it's brick wall. Then your

threshold is the ceiling.

Right. So this funny little plugin, right? Which, which I've been using for many, many years. It's got attack release and a master output, normal, normal stuff. It's got an expander with a threshold, totally normal. You know, I use this. It's very handy.

You can do a nice, gentle expander. Very, very useful, right? Then you've got the threshold for the compressor [00:31:00] and it has a headroom setting, not a, not a, not a ratio. And then you'll notice it's absolutely A knee, what you call it, a knee style, right? Yeah, that's, yeah, that's, it's a knee, James. And as you approach, as you approach brick wall, right?

Well that's brick wall. Yeah, that's brick wall right there. Right. So it's very weird. I never really understand how to conceptualize the headroom. I love the style

compressor, but it, well, MDT was, yeah, it works great. This is a great way to do compressors. And this is the same way MDT. Yeah, I think MDT was multi-band dynamics.

And you got one of those curves for every single frequency band.

Yeah, well they have a multiband version of this too, where it gets really interesting. Yeah, there you go. But considering that's a freebie, and it just comes on Apple, I mean, it's pretty damn good. What you made there, by the way, is known as a

That thing you made there with the gate and the compressor, it's known as a [00:32:00] compander.

And you'll see that on some, some, uh, like the Yamaha O2, I think, had a compander. It was basically your gate and expander together. Mm

hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah, I think pandas have almost become extinct from you

don't see them. I don't know. That's because not enough of them come anymore and and and Yamaha wants them all back from all the uh all the zoos.

Yeah,

it's that bamboo

diet that they have trouble with. Yeah. [00:33:00] and on that note, I think we should off.

Oh, man. That is definitely the end of that episode. I love how our episodes really do not have an end. They just go, boom. They really don't. It's like

you're walking along, you don't see the glass door that's actually shut in front of you.

Well, actually, there's a podcast I like, and they end the, the way they end it is one of them tricks the other ones into saying goodbye or bye. And so he'll say some sentence and then slip in the word bye. So it fits into the sentence, so it'd be like, So I realized it was very hard to come byyyyyyyy and then they would all say bye.

And that's how they'd end the episode. Because like, nobody knows how to fucking end a damn episode. So you just ramble on, and I'm like, How do we end this fucking thing?