How to do drum replacement/layering in Studio One without 3rd party plugins

Hello everyone and welcome to this week's article!

Today we're going to see how to make drum replacement in Studio One without using 3rd party plugins!

Drum replacement has always been a very sensitive topic among musicians: some love it, many hates it, but the truth that every mix engineer knows is that they are very important, almost essential to any modern rock, pop or metal production.
In order to do it there are many ways, for example by using drum replacement plugins like Slate Trigger, Aptrigga, Addictive Trigger and so on, but today I would like to focus on a technique that is available (as far as I know) only in Studio One and that makes drum replacement (or anyway turning any rhytmical source into a MIDI) very fast and without using 3rd party plugins, just follow these 5 steps:

1) Choose the track you want to replace (or layer) with samples, for example an acoustic snare or kick track, and from the top toolbar click on the Q icon, this will open a sub-menu in which you need to click on "groove" to open a field that will analyze your track.

2) Drag and drop the desired track in the groove analysis field, it will detect all the peaks in the track and mark them.

3) click on the "Audio Bend" icon on top and it will show you more tools to adjust, from there go on the "threshold" one and adjust it until only (or mostly) the kick hits (if we're replacing a kick track) are detected (because usually with the basic setting it's so sensible that it will mark also for example the snare bleed in the kick microphone).

4) When you are satisfied with the peak detection create a new Instrument Track in Studio One, and load there for example your sampler or virtual drumset, and from the groove analyzer field you can drag and drop directly a MIDI of the detected hits into your new instrument track.

5) The final step is to assign the right sound to the MIDI and clean up the track, eliminating the remaining unwated hits, adjusting the velocity and if necessary by moving the whole MIDI track few milliseconds back, if you hear some slight delay.

Voilà! 

You will have a nice MIDI replica of your acoustic track, that you can use to layer new sounds on top of it or to replace it altogether.

I hope this was helpful!

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Review: Audio Assault Hellbeast v2 (with video sample)

Hello and welcome to this week's article!

Today we're going to review the version 2.0 of another Audio Assault virtual amplifier: the Hellbeast v2!

The Hellbeast is probably the heaviest and most extreme virtual amp ever made by Audio Assault, and it's modeled on the Randall Satan amp, an amp now discontinued (but that due to some licensing change has later been produced by Fortin under the name Fortin Natas). 

This amp has the particularity of having a master gain knob and 2 other gain knobs which lets you dial separately the gain in the lows and the highs, which is a great thing if you want a tight low end, because you can keep the gain lower in the lows (so the lows are clean and fast) and raise the gain more in the high end to make the sound more aggressive and modern.

On the other hand, if you prefer a more vintage type of distortion you can raise the gain in the lows, and you will have a tone more similar to an Orange amp, which will be good for stoner, doom, or '70s hard rock.

As in all the v2 amps from the producer, also Hellbeast has all the extra features that were lacking in the first version: a completely redesigned, resizable UI, 3 channels, stompbox, rack and cab sections completely redesigned with all new IRs made by Seacow Cabs, a preset manager and (exclusive to this one) a double tracking simulator, which basically takes your playing in real time and make it sound like it's 2 layers of guitars, which is good to create some wall of sound especially during songwriting, if you don't want to spend time double-tracking everything.

All in all this is yet another good simulator that got further improved, I can't say it's my favourite from Audio Assault, it's a bit too extreme for my taste, but it actually gives you some extra flexibility compared to the others, allows you to obtain tones to a level of fine-tuning that many other sims cannot produce, and the new features are absolutely worth the upgrade.

Thumbs up!

Specs:



- 3 channels

- 3 stompboxes: Gate, Boost and Drive

- Rack Fx: 9 band equalizer, Delay, Reverb

- Dual cab IR loader with dozens of Seacow Cabs IRs

- Preset manager

- Double tracking simulator

- Resizable user interface

 

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How to create manually the glitch effect on guitars, vocals etc...

Hello and welcome to this week's article!

Today we're going to talk about a mixing topic which can be applied to any type of wave source and that, if used with parsimony, can become a powerful arrangement tool to make the track more interesting.
The "glitch" effect simulates a digital artifact of any kind (usualy the fast repetition in loop of a small soundbyte), and it's used widely in rock, pop, metal, hip hop and electronic music (for example it can be heard in the song Sex, Death and Money by Alice Cooper) as icing on the top of a cake which must already be good, to make it even better.

In order to make a glitch effect of repetition, which is the most common, you need to start with quantization, so take a small slice of the guitar track (or both if we're applying it to the rhythm ones), set the quantization to 32nds and just repeat the slice for i.e. a couple of measures (16 times, for example) and push play.

The sound will be the typical one of the reading error of a cd player, and this is just the basic version of this effect.
Now we can get creative: try to quantize slices twice as long to 16th of note (instead of 32nd) to see if they sound better, or create a rhytmical pattern, for example a 3 slice repetitions, 1 empty slice, other 3 repetitions and so on, and in this the limit is really just the imagination.

So far we have mentioned only taking one slice and repeating it, but if we have for example a riff of 4 chords, we can also simply REMOVE one or more slices, rhytmically, from the track, to create a "stutter effect", or use repetitively the same single slice per chord, or we can even change the quantization from one measure to another and move from 16ths of note to 32nds, to add even more movement.

Finally, it's time to talk about automations: with these, you can take your glitched section and automate on it one or more effects in order to give it even more character.
You can apply on it obviously any kind of effect, but our suggestion is to try one of these 2 (or both):

- a pitch shift, or tempo shift effect, that makes the pitch go down fast during for example the final part of the glitch.

- a bit crusher that goes from 0 to 100 during the glitch, to make it sound like it's deteriorating during the repetitions.

Let us know if you use other cool glitch effects!

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Review: Audio Assault Rvxx v2 (with video sample)

Hello everyone and welcome to this week's article!

Today we're going to review the version 2.0 of an amp sim we have already reviewed (here) but that after the latest update it has been changed quite substantially: the Audio Assault RVXX!

The Rvxx is the Audio Assault take on the Revv G20, the 20w amp by Revv, a small but very angry tube head, and this new version has received the same treatment received by Sigma 2.0: they have added 3 stompboxes, 3 rack effects, a dual cab ir loader with many good impulses by Seacow Cabs and a preset manager with several presets.

On top of that, the interface has been completely redesigned and now it is fully resizable, making it very versatile.

How does it sound? Better than the original, because the stompboxes now are more, so you have more versatility, and the cab section has definitely seen an improvement.
Compared to the Sigma 2.0, you can still tell that this unit has less watt, because it's a bit more upper-mid rangey and with less low end, but with the right impulse to counterbalance it, this characteristics are tamed, and you can enjoy the strong presence and bite without that thin and boxy vibe that sometimes comes with low wattage amps.

All in all this is a very usable amp simulator, oriented for metal, with a very good quality to price ratio, and I really suggest everyone to try it, it could make a good addition to your collection.

Thumbs up!

Specs:

- 2 channels

- 3 stompboxes: Gate, Boost and Drive

- Rack Fx: 9 band equalizer, Delay, Reverb

- Dual cab IR loader with dozens of Seacow Cabs IRs

- Preset manager

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Avoid snake oil and use only stuff you understand!

Hello and welcome to this week's article!

Today's article is a bit different from the usual, and it can be considered as a prosecution of our article about mixing only with stock plugins.

Mixing and mastering is a process that can be stressful at times, but it's also a moment of discovery and of creativity, in seeing the artist's vision coming together in the form of music that can be enjoyed by everyone. 
It's a process of discovery when putting together the pieces of the musical puzzle and fitting them until the picture is clear, but there is also discovery in trying every time new ways to improve and obtain better results, and this involves studying, reading, trying all the new plugins or hardware processors that we can, and all the time there is something new and more shiny that comes out.

Trying new stuff is part of the fun, in the end, but if I've learned anything in these years that I've been writing this blog, is that almost nothing is a real game changer, and that around 70% of what is advertised as a better version of what you already have brings an improvement as noticeable as "the emperor's new clothes".

Sure, there are a few game changers, for example the Neural Dsp plugins really brought the amp modeling a step forward, or Oeksound Soothe made eliminating unwanted resonances fast and easy, but besides these rare cases, there are so many good and cheap (or free, or stock) plugins out there that it's really hard to justify the real need of buying a new one, except for really just have a new toy to play with.

What I'm trying to say is that unless you're really looking for something specific that you don't have, buying a new compressor or a new equalizer most likely won't bring a real improvement in what you're currently using, and after trying so many plugins you get to a point in which you have a superficial knowledge of many of them, but you don't really know any of them very well, and this is one of the differences between an amateur and a professionist: a professionist usually has his experience built upon having something that he trusts, and he used it 1000 times, until he got to know all the ins and outs of every unit in the chain and how to obtain the best from each one of them.

The ideal point would be to choose for example a quality compressor, a quality eq, a quality delay and so on and to use them consistently until we get to a point in which we know exactly what settings are the ideal ones for our signal chain/gain staging, so that we can just plug and play, saving time and not having to do hours of trial and error looking for the right setting.

In conclusion I would suggest you, if you are at the peak of your gear acquisition syndrome, to try to stop buying anything for like 3 months and force yourself only to use what you have, I guarantee you that at the end of the third month you will have reach a level of knowledge of your plugins (or hardware processors) that will allow you to obtain results that you wouldn't have thought possible at the beginning of the trimester.
Most importantly, you might come to realize that a lot of the things advertised as "the next plugin you absolutely need" are not real game changers, in facts, most of them are what can be defined as "snake oil". 

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