Howie Weinberg Mastering Console by Acustica Audio/Studio DMI: Walkthrough and Audio Examples

[Music] hello and welcome to obsessive audio hope everybody's having a great week eric here and you know i'm always saying we've got a special treat for you and such and such and i do as you know on the channel here uh the things that i put on here i really like if i don't like it it doesn't tend to make it on but every now and then plug-in comes along that frankly blows me away and today we have the howie weinberg mastering console from acoustic audio let's take a look at this thing this has the entire howie one process in one plug-in now we're going to take a virtual journey to la more specifically laurel canyon where resides the mastering facility of a certain howie weinberg anyone in music knows who howie weinberg is he's got thousands upon thousands of credits in his name including more than 200 gold and platinum records 15 grammy awards 31 nominations now howie weinberg's entire studio workflow analog and digital equipment have been meticulously sampled by acoustic audio and made available in this plugin on one screen where all of the controls are available to you at once it's very fast to get results with this it sounds brilliant and let's take a quick look at the controls right here in the center would be the master bypass panel where you can turn the various stages on and off e would be for the equalizer c for the compressor f for the filter you've got the analog to digital converter here digital to analog converter here and the limiter right here and you can bypass everything by hitting the red one in the middle now the equalizer section is based on the sontek 432 got two bands it's all bell curves on each band you have a selector that will change the frequencies so for instance on this band you've got low frequencies to choose from you can switch that to mid frequencies if that's what you need you get plus or nine dbs of gain and here is the q the bandwidth as you increase it it gets narrower higher q and as you decrease it you can get very wide with it next section would be the f section and that's the filter section down here not only does this have high and low pass filters but it does also have some beautiful shelves they're centered at 100 cycles for the low shelf and 10 kilohertz for the high shelf now those shelves can be turned on and off with these buttons here if it's lit up they're on and if it's not lit up they're off so this would be turning on the high self this would be turning on the low shelf and down here you've got filters the high pass and the low pass so if we turn the high pass on we can select anywhere from 6 to 20 kilohertz so that's actually a pretty wide range of frequencies that you can cut out more than you'd probably use in a master but it is therefore a seam with a low pass filter up at 30 kilohertz and you can bring it all the way down and i should mention that both the shelves and the high and low pass filters are 12 db per octave slopes now the c here will turn on and off of the compressor section compressor section is based on the spl iron there are four different compression modes to choose from germanium led silicon and germanium two now the fastest responding compressor out of all these is the silicon and just a little bit slower than that would be the germanium followed by the led and germanium two would be the slowest responding compressor so you can go through those different modes and find the thing that you're looking for the best suits the material you're working on you've got your input trim here which is the standard acoustic audio input trim it's a game compensated control basically can make more or less level going into the plug-in but the output of that plug-in is going to be proportionally compensated so in effect you're just hitting the internals of the plug-in harder or quieter now keep in mind that acoustic calibrates their plug-ins to work at -18 db so you don't really need to be hitting it with anything super hot in fact i find i get a bit of more of a dynamic response if i keep the levels a little bit lower next up would be the l section which is the limiter section this is a transparent brick wall limiter that you can over sample up to eight times and basically as you increase this you're gonna hear things getting louder and louder until it starts to approach that zero db mark in which case you'll see some limiting action happening and i found you can push it pretty loud it's this plugin goes loud really well next to the limiter section you've got your digital to analog converters we've got three different converters to choose from they actually sampled howie weinberg's dcs converters and its mitetek converters and also the third one down here is my tech plus tape and that really fattens things up and conversely you have the analog to digital converter right here which can be clipped you've got three different clipping modes essentially when you turn these on and as you know that is a mastering technique to clip the converters a little bit and each of these modes gets increasingly aggressive so c1 is rather moderate and then more distortion more aggressive clipping as you go to c2 and c3 now you can control the level of clipping by pushing into it here with the cliff input and this knob controls the global output for the entire plug-in now you've got various places where you can control the gain in the chain of the plug-in at various points and one of them would be the pre-insert point here if you're not getting quite enough volume out of the limiter you've got it up all the way and you wanted to get more limiting you can hit over here i found this pre-insert here does a really nice job there's also an auto gain function here you've got a mid side control now i should mention that both the clipper and limiter have over sampling available so you can choose one times four times or eight times over sampling and further than that the plugin also has an hq mode so if you wanted maximum quality you would go eight times eight times and hq and that would have the plugin operating at its maximum quality and while we're on the topic of these buttons right here there is a control link button what this does is link the left and right channels so if i make an adjustment on the left channel you can see over here that the right is following and vice versa and that's what control link does if you work in stereo this is probably the first button you're going to hit now the lr and the ms buttons are for the equalizer lr is for left right mode ms is for mid-side mode phase switch polarity reverse the dim button just lowers the whole output of the plug-in by 20 decibels so if you're working and things are loud and you still want to hear it but not that loud hit him and it will be 20 decibels quieter now there are three buttons down here which change the routing of the different components you can put the equalizer before the compressor with this button you can put the limiter before the adc with this button and you put the filter section before the dac this button and generally speaking and i've only played with this for about a day now but you get a little more fatness i found when i move this around in some circumstances generally speaking the default settings are working great for me and i look forward to playing around with some of those subtleties later on so finally the meters up here you've got a vu meter and you can calibrate that as well if you want it to read a little louder you can move this trim up and this only affects the level the response of the meter it doesn't affect the sound at all here you've got both for left and right you've got a peak meter and also a lifts meter to measure your loudness you've got a gain reduction meter for the compressor a stereo phase correlation meter and gain reduction for the limiter so those are the controls of the plug-in i know it's a lot but let's listen to some audio examples we'll play with the plug-in start getting familiar with it uh for this let's just choose three we'll do a rock tune and an electronic kind of dancer tune and then a funk song okay so first thing i'm going to do is get some quality happening here i'm gonna turn eight times on for the limiter and for the clipper we're also gonna hit the hq this is gonna increase cpu load significantly but if you've got a good machine it'll handle it no problem and of course you could always increase the latency on your sound card to give your cpu a bit more of a break and get away with more processing here we go yeah you're tough [Music] [Applause] [Music] first thing i want to do is hit the control link so i'm just going to do basic stereo let's take out some mids around 350 i think [Music] shelf [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] let's put on the converters and the clipper something to keep in mind with this plug-in sometimes get little dropouts and little volume bursts something to keep in mind maybe you want to stop it if you're going to switch stuff around a lot [Music] let's crank her up [Music] a few [Music] let's try to clip it [Music] here [Music] so there's an example a couple minutes you can tweak away and get something pretty decent happening all the controls are right there so you're not switching between plug-in one plug-in to the next plug-in it's just all right there it's very handy very convenient very intuitive and i find the results like i can get loud really quickly and now mind you this track was on analog already a whole bunch so it already kind of had that advantage of having the transients reduced so it had a bit of a loudness advantage to begin with but the digital stuff i find get it loud no problem with this too let's move on to the next example so this one i've already got tweaked and uh what i'm actually going to do here is i'm just going to use the wet dry mix knob and reaper so we won't get those dropouts and let's hear the raw track and then i'll flip this over could hear what the mastering did too [Music] [Applause] so [Music] let's turn it on [Music] off [Music] so yeah it's louder that's kind of the point [Music] [Music] you can see that the compressor is just hitting like a decibel here and there sometimes see with a limiter [Music] no law and data because there already was a lot [Music] let's go back a bit let's play with the compressors dig into it silicon so it's fast it's a little bit pumpy [Music] let's go to the next slowest one [Music] seize up that threshold a bit [Music] now the motion is a little bit slower and then led and you may find that you need to adjust the threshold a little bit because the models do have different responses [Music] oh i like this one [Music] so [Music] that's really nice [Music] and while we're in electronic mode here is kind of a half well you'll hear [Music] it's the raw track [Music] on [Music] off on [Music] what do we have here no eq slight amount of the logo shell quite a bit more of the high self smooth [Music] this time we did opt for the high pass filter [Music] that's right near the bottom there got the tape mode on let's try the dc8s mode and to avoid that pop i'm gonna just bypass it now let's change it to dcs here let's bring it back in [Music] dcs clears a characteristic sound dcs converter secure season mastery studios [Music] [Music] let's hear the my tech a little cleaner on the top end more extended [Music] and let's hear my attack plus tape [Music] [Music] so in that case the i would go with the dcs or the my tech plus tape because that was just a little bit of fattening there that i think that the raw track needed let's go and move on to a funk example here okay so funk track uh this one doesn't look like it has any eq on it your filters looks like this is all being done with the compressor and the limiter so let's check it out i'll bypass it first here we go [Music] turn it on you see here the compressor's just clamping down a little bit this example has some more peaks as digital so so that limit is grabbing it and then the occasional clipping let's play around [Music] let's go really extreme with the clipping [Music] we'll turn it down a bit [Music] see we went with the second most aggressive one [Music] let's pick the gnarliest one [Music] i mean obviously wouldn't use that on the master but it's just to give you an idea of the flavor of that clipping it's a little different from the clippers that i'm used to anyway it does have that oh this is a nice juicy kind of break up there let's kind of go back to what we had here [Music] curious what this would sound like with a bit of the high shell it feels like maybe it needs too much clipping get too much high shelf [Music] yep [Music] so there you have it the howie weinberg mastering console plugin from acoustic audio i think this one's going to be big it sounds amazing i hope you agree i hope you enjoyed this hope you found this helpful make sure you like and subscribe got a lot of cool new videos coming up don't miss them and we'll see you next time on obsessive audio [Music]

Channel: Obsessive Audio

Views: 7,042

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Id: Tm7DXoj53SM

Length: 22min 36sec (1356 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 26 2021