FabFilter Pro R Explained

hi this is Daniel Wyatt from mix master Wyatt calm and we're taking a look today at fab filters new Pro are now anytime fab filter comes out with anything new of course I'm interested we're interested at the school we use so much Pro L Pro DS proceeded to pro-q to pro-mb fab filter such a big part of our clean digital workflow that of course when they finally came out with a reverb we wanted to see what it's all about and I personally was very curious to see what it's all about I think people often have problems with two main things we see at the school one is compression and one is reverb compression because you have lots of different controls attack release ratio all this stuff and it changes the shape of the compression which takes a little while to understand reverb the big problem here is that people often are scared to edit reverb you know they they put on a reverb they flip through the presets they find a preset and they adjust the send level or the wet/dry mix and that's it and the problem with that is that you don't really get to focus and fine-tune your reverb and a lot of reverb controls historically you've had lots of weird controls bass multipliers and all kinds of things that just seem to sciency and too complicated and I think it scared the average producer engineer from getting too crazy with the reverb editing but fine-tuning your reverb is absolutely critical and the best mixes and the best productions they have some very tuned up reverbs reverbs that are custom adjusted to optimize that moment in that sound of that impact and then ambience so with that in mind and I can't tell you exactly what fabfilter was thinking but I think they wanted to create a very user-friendly reverb that encouraged you to tweak it and and they put all of the knobs right in your face there is nothing under the hood here I think what's interesting about this design is not what they put under the hood is what they actually put over the hood if you will or in your face right in front of you they're encouraging you to to manipulate tweak adjust your reverb to make it really really fit okay you know within the world of reverb there's organic reverb like room mics there's analog reverb like plates and spring reverb there is digital algorithmic reverb which is the lexicon line and Valhalla stuff like that and then there's convolution reverb like altiverb where they actually sampled spaces this is not a convolution reverb and there's a lot of chatter out there with these hybrid convolution reverb models and people are going to start to perhaps improve upon what was really an industry standard certainly for film but this is not that this is digital algorithmic reverb which means that it's very very fancy digital delay box and of course reverb is a phenomenon of delay write delay is the mother of reverb so you can create a reverb plug-in using digital algorithmic reverb which is what they've done here so let's take a look at the controls and then we'll give it a little test run and we'll listen to it in context with a synth lead the big knob is right here in your face it's space in your face and it goes from counterclockwise small to clockwise quite large small rooms medium rooms small halls large halls up to cathedrals so the space here you can adjust and grab this and you'll see that it gives you the decay setting in the center now if you love the quality of the space and the size of the space and the tone of the reverb but you want a longer or shorter decay here this control here allows you to fine tune the decay right from 100% which is what it would default to with the space setting to longer or shorter so here's your decay adjuster here and now let's jump and go left to right brightness defaults here to 50% which is sort of the neutral setting as you go clockwise you get more brightness as you go counterclockwise you get darkness it's a tone knob controller doesn't really say exactly what it is my guess is it's some kind of tilt shelf I don't think it has anything to do with adding high frequency harmonics or taking the Y I think it's simply a tilt EQ that's my guess it doesn't really say in the manual character setting goes from clean to chorus and this of course is gives you control of the modulation that naturally occurs in reverb but then you can really overemphasize it and take it to a very chorus place or have it be quite clean and that's the character the distance is a crossfader between the early reflections and the late reflections so if you want to pull something into the front of the mix psycho acoustically you're going to hear more early reflections and as you sink something back into a room or a cathedral or a hall you're going to hear that slow buildup of the late reflections so this is a psycho acoustic slider that can put your sound source or whatever you're putting reverb on in the front middle or back super handy right there easy to use quite simple but that is sort of a traditional reverb control they're stereo width right is wonderful to have it also right in your face you can have a mono reverb and mono reverb can actually be quite interesting and you can use them in all kinds of sterilizing ways but most of life is stereo right most ambient spaces in real life for stereo and then you can push them to be super stereo which will pull your ears wide and you can fine tune it if it sounds too gimmicky you can pull it back wet/dry mix of course if you want to put it on the insert of an individual sound and wet/dry mix it that is of course legal most time at the school we like to put things on the return tracks gives us more opportunity to do further processing and down here the pre delay is hiding of course the pre delay is the amount of time it takes before you hear the first reflections of the reverb and you can use that as a rhythmic slap back can be very cool you can use it for a little moment of dryness before the wetness comes on and occurs and you can even use it as a thickener with short pre-delay times almost like a flammie kind of thing can be very cool your analyzer can show you you can turn it off it could be pre or end post or reverb and post and it's got this beautiful dreamy reverb decay metering that's beautiful of course I would expect nothing less from fabfilter because they have great controls great sound and always a wonderful aesthetic sense which makes them wonderful and a pleasure to work on probably the most other significant thing to take note of here are the 2 other things that are in your face which is the decay rate EQ and the post EQ now the decay rate EQ gives you the ability to control the decay within a certain frequency zone or spectrum and these shapes are typical you have a bell-shaped response you have shelves and also you have a notch so what this does is as you move this around and you can add as many instances as you like you can emphasize or lengthen or shorten the decay within a certain frequency selection and you can change the shapes as we see here if you want to change the queue you can to finger scroll on a Mac and this changes the queue as well so you have all kinds of control over the shape of the decay within your selected frequency range and your shape and you can emphasize it up to 200% or increase it rather up to 200% or down as much as 12 percent so it's sort of not symmetrical there but that's the way it is designed and this allows you to have longer decays on the low end to warm something up to have shorter decays on the high end to naturalize things most spaces don't really have lots of high frequency decay and take out the middle which might be mud or too much traffic in the mid range or then or emphasize it for more warmth depending on the sound so that is your decay rate EQ completely innovative and very easy to use completely visual and all the rest now the final thing that they're inviting you by this design to tweak is the post EQ and usually we have these post D cues that are small and claustrophobic and they're hidden somewhere under some little you know tweak mode hood and they feel tiny and you get carpal tunnel syndrome moving them around this is not that this is from the people who brought us beautiful visual clear easy to see EQ so now we have that EQ in our reverb which invites you to use it right that's what I said at the beginning one of the biggest problems people have is getting the reverbs really really precise and their ambience is precise and to allow them to relate is they're scared of editing because editing has been so sciency so now it invites you to play with it you can do all kinds of things if you push if you're pushing the decay in one zone you could emphasize that tonality or you could de-emphasize it to sort of equalize it and balance it you know if you want to make something more poppy you might want to brighten up the highs in the post EQ and make it more glossy and shiny or you might want to make it darker and more natural and if you pull the EQ or create an instance here it automatically intelligently knows it's a shelf so with all of that being said let's play with this thing you start with the basic which is here and sort of zeros you out the basic is not the default the default is here which already has some decay EQ and some post EQ which is cool but I think it's better to start with the basic and let's have some fun I have here a dry Apple loop so you can try this at home if you have logic and first we'll just listen to it dry I'm going to bypass the reverb I have it set up here on a auxilary track and here is the dry lead and there's nothing more sad than a dry lead in the world right nothing is more sad than a lead that has no room to play in very very sad so let's give it some reverb I'm going to send I'll start here with the send of well minus three which is probably more than you would do in a mix but it all depends and let's give this a test-drive here with all these fun tweakable controls first we'll just check out the different spaces and then we'll just tweak it out a little bit and have some fun and you can hear the character wasn't totally obvious on this one I've had other sounds that I played with where was much more obviously coracii and of course we can tweak it out as well with our eq's but the distance you can hear you hear those late reflections to build up those bases light reflections when you go too far and when you're near you hear more of a bright early reflection response okay so let's play with a little bit of stereo mix and then let's jump right in and start to have a little bit of fun with this decay rate EQ and you have to love that beautiful smoke over the mountaintop visual right so lots of different tonal controls with the decay in different frequencies owns making it warmer making it brighter making it darker making it thinner and now let's play with the post EQ finally just to see what it is the post-acute the response is a little more dramatic it's sort of your final word on your reverb sound and it gives you quite a bit of control actually and really the possibilities are completely endless and you can just go crazy having fun really getting the tone of your reverb to reflect whatever you want to happen in that moment and one of the things I love to do with fabfilter is because the presets are so intelligently put together is I love to look at the presets and kind of reverse-engineer them also I think a lot of these would make really good t-shirts what's a good t-shirt not that one maybe that one I think that would this is called artificial cinematic space I think that could make a beautiful t-shirt or a beautiful painting but it also gives you some ideas of how the designers on a serious note how the designers are thinking about the use of the post EQ and the decay rate EQ and how they can work together so you kind of get some insight and as to what what they thought was cool here's some very interesting looking comb filtered presets and again it looks like high art that I would you know like to see in a big gallery but it also shows you that where they're notching some of the decay rate EQ they're giving little boosts to to achieve this effect with the post EQ so just getting getting some cool ideas of how these two things work together Thank You fabfilter for putting this out I will certainly be using this I think it will encourage me to have much more fun adjusting the decay and the post EQ in my reverbs and I think it sounds beautiful it has a beautiful sound I think it's capable of very dark warm natural sounds but also some very poppy bright shiny sounds as well a beautiful design beautiful package great sound that's what fabfilter does thank you pro R I'm sure that I will be using this in my freelance work and that we'll be using this quite a bit in the school to get the cutting edge sound I hope you enjoy this tutorial we'll keep them coming go to Mix Master Wyatt comm we have all kinds of courses self-study video courses courses with teachers all kinds of shoot out workshops millions of courses for the up-and-coming producers all over the world and I'll see you online

Channel: Next Level Sound

Views: 27,695

Rating: 4.8757281 out of 5

Keywords: fabfilter, pro-r, pro tools, vst3, next level sound, logic pro, fabfilter reverb, fabfilter pro r, plugin, Mixmasterwyatt, pro r, audio, pror, Dubspot, Audio mixing, reverb, audio units, yt:cc=on, logic, Mixing, cubase, mixmasterwyatt, mixing tutorial, vst, aax, tutorial, mixing, mastering, compressor, limiter, dynamics, plug-in, eq, rtas, plug-in (software genre), compression, au, dubspot, sound, expander

Id: tv4Um_2NnbI

Length: 21min 11sec (1271 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 17 2016