Andrew Scheps' In-Depth Mixing Tips for Scheps Omni Channel

[Music] hi I am Andrew chefs and we're here at Mono Valley Studios and Wales to show you the chefs omni-channel so the chef's omni-channel is made up of a lot of individual modules in each of those modules has generally at least two or three components within it so what we're gonna do is go through one by one so you get an idea and then we'll do a few things where we actually use multiple elements at the same time to show you how they interact so in the default configuration the preamp is the first module in the chef's omni-channel at the top of the preamp module there is a saturation and you can see that the preamp module can be bypassed or just the saturation portion of the preamp so what I'm going to do is play the snare drum and I'm going to bypass the saturation while it's playing so it's a subtle effect it's adding some upper harmonic distortion and they're also three flavors of this saturation [Music] so you might have noticed that the odd and even are actually a little bit similar and these are gonna be very dependent on what you put into them as to how different they'll be but in general the even is even harmonics added to the signal and this will be the more open and the cleanest of the three the odd is odd harmonics obviously it's a similar sound to the even but it is very different and will respond to different frequency ranges differently whereas the heavy mode is actually a clipper so you're getting all harmonics all the time so the next process down in the preamp our high pass filter and low pass filter very straight ahead they're useful utility filters not meant to add color per se and there are three different slopes 6 DB per octave 12 DB per octave 18 DB per octave high-pass and low-pass they can be individually bypassed so you can use just one or the other you can use them individually on the left or right or mid side depending on what mode the module is in [Music] so pretty straight ahead what you would expect but they're actually quite useful and you'll see as you start to chain the modules how the filters can really help set you up for the next process and while we're on the base I'll show you the third process within the preamp module which is thump it's basically a very broad low-end EQ but to my ears and how we built it was sort of feel like the resonance you get out of some of the older analog over built circuits like a fairchild la-2a helios that sort of thing we're just switching in the circuit there's so much stuff so much wire so much feedback within the circuit that you actually feel as though some of that low-frequency is resonating so I'll walk you through the two settings on the thump [Music] seeking here it's a nice subtle broad kind of boost in the low-end and that in conjunction with the high-pass filter and the low-frequency EQ can really help you shape your low-end so moving left to right in the default configuration the next module is the gate module it's a full-featured gate and expander and if you're not aware the only difference between a gate and an expander is the ratio so basically an expander takes everything below the threshold and turns it down and a gate is a version of that where the ratio is a hundred to one or more so it acts more as a switch or a gate to let the audio through which is where the name came from rather than expander which will just expand the dynamic range by turning down the quiet stuff just to give you an idea of what it can do I've got it across the drumkit it's not necessarily something you would do in this particular mix but you'll get an idea because you need something with some transients to really see what the gate can do so at the top you can just choose between gate and expander and all that does is change the ratio so soft or hard threshold very obvious like any gate that is the level at which you will start expanding when your audio is below that level right below that is something called floor and it's basically letting you define the noise floor in other gates that might be called range it's how much am I going to turn you down how much am I allowed to affect the signal when I'm below the threshold next is a very interesting control called close and on this particular drum kit you don't get a lot of room with this but what it does is it lets you set an opening threshold with the threshold control and a separate clothes threshold that can be quieter so if you've got something with a very heart attack and then a slow decay sometimes what will happen is the gate will kind of chatter as it starts to close so you can set your closed threshold much much lower which lets the sound died away before the gate will close so the last two visible controls are attack and release which are pretty obvious for a gate but there are also a couple other controls and what I'm gonna do now is show you a feature that's available in all of the modules but it lets you access all of the controls that aren't on the front panel so down at the bottom of this module you can click the zoom icon or up at the top here and it brings the gate fullscreen you can see not only do you now have separate controls for left and right if you decide to process them separately or work in MS mode but you also have a full-featured sidechain with a high pass and a low pass filter and there are a couple of really interesting things about these filters one is that just like with every control in this plug-in as soon as you touch a control it engages that process so the default for these filters is to not be engaged but as soon as I move the frequency control the filters switched in so you're not doing that thing where you move a control thinking you're affecting the sound and you're not no gotchas with this the other thing is there is a link control at the bottom which once you set the bandwidth of the filters you can actually sweep it as a bandpass filter through the signal by default the sidechain that you're filtering is an internal sidechain so it's whatever audio is passing into the module but you do like with any of the side chains in the plug-in have access to an external side chains so you can set an input from any external interface or bus and then you can set it to be an external sidechain with the button on this expanded GUI so the next module we're going to talk about is the DS squared module there are two identical modules but what's special about them is that they actually work over the full twenty to twenty K frequency range you've got four different filter types and then you've got a threshold and there's a special feature which I'm going to show you now as I hit play which is if you hold down control and move either the threshold or the frequency control it will bandpass so you can hear exactly what frequency you're trying to focus in on and this feature is actually available here and EQ and in some of the EQ for the side-chaining as well the easiest way to walk you through this is I'm gonna use an audio example of some acoustic guitars and I'm gonna use one of the dealers to take away some of the pick noise on the strings and the other one to take away some of the boom of the body [Music] so it's a little heavy-handed in this example but you can see how you really get control over different parts of the sound that make up the complete instrument when you look at the DSR here you don't have a filter but again you have the option to use an external sidechain and using an external sidechain on a DSO may sound a little counterintuitive but here's a really interesting example for you if you think about sidechain compression in dance music with a kick drum and a bass you've got a steady bass going on and what you want with the sidechain compressor is every time the kick drum hits it will duck the bass out of the way so that your kick drum comes through more strongly you can actually use the d s squared to do the exact same thing with an external sidechain but to only affect a certain frequency range so you can duck out the boom of your synth bass but leave all of the buzz which you can't do if you just use an external sidechain on a compressor the next module is the EQ module and on the face of it it's a very simple module but it has four full frequency bands that have three different flavors each every single one of the four bands can be flipped into parametric mode so that you can do surgically cueing at any frequency with any of the bands that you're not using for something else now I'm gonna switch that high shelf to parametric and show you I can use it just to get rid of some harsh part of the cymbals using the control shortcut to solo the band [Music] in there more musical mode the high band defaults to a shelf as does the low band and the two mid bands are for bell-curve boosting but there are two different flavors for each of these so you may have noticed when I was switching the shelf option on the high band that the two shelves sound very different one of them is a more traditional smooth shelf that follows what you would expect and the other is a pretty highly resonant shelf which gives you a lot of bite to write at the corner of the shelf the low band is almost identical to the high band in terms of having a resonant shelf and a more smooth shelf as well as the full parametric mode so I'm just going to go ahead and show you what those sound light [Music] the other two bands in the EQ are labelled tone and mid and they're generally meant for the tone and mid-range part of the frequency spectrum but like the high and low bands can go anywhere the idea though is that they're very different sounding when you're not in parametric modes so I'm gonna go ahead and show you what it sounds like in the wide q mode and then we'll check out the narrow q mode [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so you can hear they're both very musical they just have completely different characteristics so you decide which one you like for a particular sound and then you've got the other band free to do something else like possibly the narrowband [Music] [Applause] [Music] so you can hear there's more resonance just like you would expect with a narrower queue so the next module we're going to talk about is the compressor module and this is a very flexible module but the main thing we tried to do while building it was to give you three different types of compression that you could very quickly switch between to get an idea of what you wanted to use without having to reset all your parameters so you can hear the three different types of compression have very very different sounds and to describe them quickly the VCA would be more like a modern compressor it's much faster and cleaner the fet compressor is something that's gonna be a little bit dirtier but it's still pretty fast and then the optical compressor is very slow you heard how much more of a transient makes it through without changing the attack and release so you've got full control over attack and release with the controls you also have a threshold control but if that's not enough you can open up the expanded GUI once again and get to a sidechain which can be internal or external and instead of just having filters on this side chain you actually have a full eq so i'm gonna go ahead and engage that and just start messing with the eq on the side chain you'll hear how different it can be [Music] so you can hear by using that EQ you can really make the compressor ignore the kick drum ignore the snare drum only work on the decay of the snare drum that sort of things you've got a lot of flexibility especially when you think about how to use that with an external sidechain - and while this compressor doesn't work in a fully parallel mode what it does give you is a dry wet control so you can set up something that's a little more compressed than you would like and dial it back and it's the idea of having uncompressed and compressed coming through the same module sounds like this so by using the different types of compression attack and release controls the sidechain and the wet dry control you can really really shape the way you're compressing but you still have the option to check out the other types of compression on the fly knowing that the controls are going to be as close as we could get them so you'll actually hear your options at the top of every module there are three more buttons st duo and ms so that's for stereo dual mono or ms controls we've got the same three buttons across the top when you work in stereo mode by default your controls are linked and when you're in the zoomed State you can actually see you've got separate controls for left and right and they move together you'll notice with the ratio control though it's actually moving with an offset so they're linked and we're in stereo but your left and right have different ratios you can unlink change either one and then relink and now continue to move with that offset when you're working in duo mode on an EQ or some passive process duo and unlinking your controls are the exact same thing you've got a left side and a right side when you're working with the dynamics plug-in like the compressor or the D s squared it actually completely changes how the processor works in stereo mode you're working with a combined mono detector which will allow you to work on the combined energy of left and right when you're in duo mode it's actually giving you two separate left and right dynamics processors and they look at their own sidechain so you can see that you might want to have a multi mono compressor but actually link the controls so in that case switch to duo mode and then you can link and that is actually a very different sound to just working in stereo mode so quick example of why you might want to use duo mode on an EQ for instance is in the chorus the hi-hat is on the left and is a little bit harsh so I'm using the high shelf I'm using the mid-range already in the wideband mode and the low shelf is well to EQ the drums but I've got this tone control available but I don't want to suck out that mid-range everywhere just on the left side so I'm going to roll the tape switch it into duo mode find that frequency suck a little bit out and there you go another way to think about EQ in something like a drum kit is in ms mode which is completely different so we're gonna start thinking about the middle of the drum kit and the sides of the drum kit instead of the left and right so I'm gonna reset the EQ I'm going to take out some of the low-end in the sides of the drum kit bringing up the high end of the cymbals I'm gonna start reinforcing the kick and the meet of the snare just in the middle [Music] now I'm going to switch back over to the preamp put it in ms mode so that I can use the high-pass filters separately on the right side of the plugin is the announced section and they're basically five different parts of the announced section you've got input controls with two faders that can either be linked or not you've got output controls with two faders that can either be linked or not you've got a monitor matrix which is actually incredibly useful for hearing the different parts of the audio signal you can monitor in stereo mono you can listen to the left side or the right side individually you can also listen to the mid or the side component individually regardless of how you're processing the audio within the plug-in there are also two vu meters with really good ballistics as well as a Headroom control so depending on how you're working if you're working with really hot levels you can actually dial the meters back to get them into a useful range and above each of the input faders is a phase flip button to control the polarity of what's going into the plug-in and also in the announce section there is limiter where you've got full control over the threshold and obviously you can switch it out as well and if you're working with a stereo version of the plug-in at the bottom of the announce section is a link button which will tie the input faders together and the output faders together so they move as one so now that you've seen all of the individual modules you think about how the audio goes between them from the input all the way to the output of the plug-in and one of the things that comes up is the order that you're processing in so any module can go in any order all you have to do is click the arrows at the top drag it over you've now reordered your modules one thing you might be thinking about while reordering module is something as simple as do I want to EQ before or after my dynamics processing so you could decide to move the compressor pre or post EQ and there you go as easy as that and if the five modules that come stock in the Omni channel aren't enough there is a fully-featured insert point but not only can you add a second of any of the processing modules included in the Shep's Omni channel you can actually add almost any waves plug-in inside of the module so let's say you're working with your drums and using the thump the low-end EQ and the d s squared you've managed to really shape the low-end and you like what's going on but you realize you think the kick is a little bit high what you can do is put the insert first in the chain and come in here to the plug-in list and actually put in a torque now you can tune that drum down before you go through the rest of the processing we've tried to keep the interface on this plugin as intuitive as possible but if you want to explore a little bit you can use some of the presets we've got a lot of presets done by a lot of different people some really cool stuff there's a special feature though on the presets that I did called focus mode you can turn that off if it bothers you but if you have it on when you recall any of the presets there'll be two or three parameters that are highlighted in orange in the GUI so for instance on the drum kit right now I've got the crush drums preset and you notice that the saturation level the tone frequency and the release time on the compressor are the three controls that I felt do the most to shape the sound so what I'm going to do now is play you the drums and we'll mess with those three controls and see what they do [Music] so normally you would think of a channel strip like this as being something you would always use to process something directly either on an insert on a track or maybe on an aux and what I decided to do is actually build up a little parallel drum distortion using the plugin so on its own it sounds like this and we can even make it a little more distorted so not something you necessarily want your drums to sound like but in parallel [Music] well as you can see there's a lot to the omni-channel but hopefully now you've got a really good handle on the different pieces and what they all do and how they can work together [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Waves Audio

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Keywords: Andrew Scheps, Scheps Omni Channel, Scheps Omni, Omni Channel, Channel Strip, Channel Strip Mixing, Mixer Andrew Scheps, In-depth mixing, Andrew Scheps tips, Mixing tips, Channel Strip tips, Channel strip mixing tips, Andrew Scheps in-depth, Scheps tips, Scheps mixing tips, Waves mixing, Waves channel strip, Waves Scheps, Andrew Scheps Waves, Waves mixing tutorial, Mixing tips Waves, waves audio tutorial, waves plugins tutorial

Id: 4d8k9q2wREE

Length: 24min 38sec (1478 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 12 2018