iZotope Neutron 3 Mixing Suite Overview

[Music] hi I'm Mitch Gallagher welcome to the Sweetwater minute with a special guest here today Jeff from iZotope great to see you man likewise always a pleasure to have you come back and show us the cool new stuff that you guys have been working on I'm happy to be here it's always awesome and you have something really exciting for us to check out you've got the latest version of neutron which you're calling it witchcraft earlier and I think that's I think that's appropriate because what you're doing is just it's beyond belief tell us what's new in Neutron 3 so I'll cover the big kind of crunchy bits the first thing is we have this thing called Nick's assistant and this is the idea that you can throw Mick's assistant on either a track or a whole mix and get a really good result so if you're using on an individual track it'll EQ and compress the track for you give you a starting point but the brand new thing is this balance assistant which is part of mix assistant which gives you a great overall balance which is really the foundation upon which the rest of the mix is built you get the balance right or you can move forward with confidence mixing a queuing all the rest of it so balance assistant I think it's going to help people get a big head start when they're mixing right what that does this kind of set up the the basic starting point for the levels of all your different tracks and you can still use visual mixer you can still go back later and use track assistant to work on the individual track so you can dig deep into that but it just gives you a great starting point exactly it's just that initial balance which is the foundation of your mix and from there you can go on like you said EQ compress one of the new toys with Neutron 3 is the sculptor module which uses spectral shaping to enhance your tracks make them the best version that they can be helped situate them it within the context of a busy mix so balanced assistant sculptor also resize ability you can resize any module in the plugin component or mothership level it looks different it behaves differently and we're really excited about it you're talking about how you even made it so much more efficient how much faster it loads that's right so now it'll load you know three times as fast as Neutron 2 it uses less memory less CPU if you have let's say hypothetically a hundred neutrons in your session that session will load in under 20 seconds so big pain point for people coming from Neutron 2 is like I love it I want to use all the power but it's a little bit intensive on the CPU we've addressed that and we're really happy to unveil that with Neutron three incredible give us the demo I gotta check this out okay let's jump into what's new in Neutron three I'm going to walk through some of the brand new features mix assistance sculptor resize ability there's a lot to cover so I want to start with I think the marquee feature which is our balanced assistant technology what the balance is is the foundation of the mix so setting the guitar right setting the vocals right setting the drums right this is something seasoned mix engineers do and know how to do because it's essential for starting a mix you need to get all those levels right and then move on to compression EQ etc we have a new tool called balanced assistant which can get you started and do this kind of for you in a way so that you can focus more on the creative stuff with mixing reverb EQ all that stuff now there are a couple of steps it's a bit like baking a cake we have to follow a recipe and the first thing you have to do is drag in all your tracks into an empty session like here drag them in to the start of my session drop them there press ok and now we have all the tracks in logic open X here to open this window and I'm going to place an instance of relay across all of these tracks by selecting them first going to relay now it adds them all now relay is a channel operations plug-in it's very lightweight CPU light you can control gain panning widths but it's real function is to communicate between mix assistant and the tracks sending information about the gain and information about the instrument to the kind of mothership where things are going to be balanced so we need to put it on every track you can also do this with Neutron but we kind of recommend using relay because it's a little bit more CPU light just easier to kind of spread around the mix the first step so I'll close this now I'll hit my master track stereo out you might have to create one in Pro Tools but in logic there's one already kind of baked in it'll open the visual mixer which is back but expandable now you can bring it the whole size of the screen if you want the canvas is totally up to you so we also have this little icon up here mix assistant so this is the kind of start of our balancing so I'm going to press it and we get this setup screen telling you exactly what I have been doing here so placing an instance of relay on all the tracks and then making sure that all of your pan pots are at midnight you know twelve o'clock and all of your faders are at Unity game so we've already done that I'll press begin and now we have to set a focus for the mix so the focus is what you want to prioritize over everything else it could be a vocal it could be a guitar could be a synth depending on the genre but we have to choose at least one thing to be the focus of the mix so for me it's a couple of vocals here so I'm gonna go down and relay has shared all the information about the tracks as far as their tags go into the balance system here so I can see my lead Vox one that's one thing I want to make the focus the 26 year Vox bridge that's another thing I want to make the focus and 31 is also something I want to make the focus and I know that because I know this session very well it might be good for you to kind of listen through and make sure that you know what you want to click but having the track information shared from relay into visual mixer is really handy so you can kind of situate yourself and go oh there's my vocal there's my guitar so a press begin listening and you want to make sure that your track is playing from the very beginning so you want to make sure that your transport bar here is all the way at the beginning of the mix and now you just press the spacebar and we see this little icon showing up here with these musical notes going into the ear and this tells you that the listening pass is starting [Music] so as you're listening you're not gonna hear anything changing in the background with some of our assistive audio technology like track enhance or repair assistant you might hear things moving and kind of switching around in the background this is different though you're not gonna hear anything changing it's actually just kind of receiving audio interpreting audio using some machine learning to identify the instrument and also just taking in Lu FS levels from the tracks to determine based on your focus where the levels should be set so don't worry if you don't hear anything that's totally normal what you do have to make sure though is that you play it from the beginning to the end there's no offline process this has to happen in real time and for that reason we actually have this little icon built-in called Neutron tips and tricks' you can press this and go to our website and read about mixing and mastering if you like you can make a coffee you can also you know get a notepad and a pen and just take down maybe stuff that you hear in the mix this is a good time for you to listen to what's actually in the session so often we reach for a compressor and EQ we just dive in and start mixing but it's important to listen and take stock of what's happening in the session and this might spark ideas for things you want to do later on you know avenues you want to go down you might hear some issues on the track that you might want to RX so this is actually a really good time for you to sit and kind of listen to what's happening but we have to go from the start to the finish okay masae was on my mind up is imagine wasting the weight of my passion youngin was one with the heart of a lion but with the flow of a dragon a magnum just fade away [Music] like a good mix engineer I'm gonna wait till everything decays fades out we've reached the end so I'll press the space bar to stop transport and now I'll press this icon go to results and from here we see the brand-new balance screen so from here we can see five different buckets we have the volkl bucket right here voice focus this is everything that's in our focus group base everything that's bass and percussion and musical as well and we can control them a little bit like VCA sliders and bring things up or down you'll notice that when we bring musical up or down everything musical goes up and down and that's because using machine learning we've determined what the musical tracks are and put them into that bucket same thing with voice and bass and so on and so forth but if you want you can actually go in and see what the machine learning slotted where by going to this little edit classification button clicking on it and going through and making sure the things are where they need to be if you notice that something's out of place and it's totally normal to get a false positive you can change that so for example the electronic kick if thought that was musical so we'll go over here percussion for the bass it thought that was musical bring that to bass so this is always good to go in and just double check the things are where they need to be I'll change this to percussion as well and this to percussion as well so I can close that window and let's do a little before and after after we've classified our tracks over a little loop here and this is just the default so we haven't actually changed any of these sliders this is just the custom balance that makes assistant is providing for us so let's have a listen to how that sounds [Music] that is the lab your no cutting like that like that so the default sounds really good but I do want to make some changes and we invite people to do that that's why we have these sliders which you can control here so I'll do that now I'll bring up musical a little bit right because we've been there like that we've been working misty for a minute like that so I brought up the bass the percussion musical I'll bring up the focus a little bit right because we've been it like that we've been working misty for like that now let's try another couple before-and-afters to make sure that we're kind of in the ballpark because we've been it like that [Music] we haven't done any compression in a EQ and your reverb this is all the power of a really great balance which mix assistant can help you with so that you can get started with all that fun stuff that creative stuff much faster so in a nutshell that is balanced with it's part of mix assistant and it's totally genre agnostic so if you're throwing a metal track a hip-hop track or rock track anything through this it'll get you started with a great level the next thing I want to talk about is the sculptor module this module is brand-new in Neutron 3 and it uses a technology called spectral shaping which is kind of like a combination between EQ and compression to mold smooth shape your track toward an ideal target the instruments often take on different profiles EQ wise and compression wise once they're embedded in the context of a busy mix so we built our targets from that so this is a great way for you to quickly insert drum bass guitar vocal anything and help it fit in the mix and the more sculptors you use we find the better the instrument separation is across the whole mix and this leads to usually a really healthy tonal balance overall so I'm gonna jump in and show you how the sculptor module works we have a little clean guitar here it sounds like this I've opened a sculptor as a component plug-in so not within the whole mothership of Neutron and advanced only you can get all the kind of breakout component plugins and this is the screen that you're met with when you open sculptor for the first time you see these targets I was talking about a minute ago we have bass guitar keys orchestral percussion voice we have weaving one for dialogue for people doing post-production we have all-purpose as well and this is if you're looking to do something on the whole mix or on a mix bus or something like that because we're working with guitar I'm gonna go to the folder here we get the subfolder acoustic clean electric and distorted electric now while this track isn't really distorted electric I really like the way that this target sounds so I'll click it and now I'm gonna mess around a little bit with the the settings here the first is the intensity tone this changes the profile from a bright or maybe a darker profile and speed is the ballistics the attack and release of the compressor settings how quick or slowly you want them to behave and react so let's go before and after I'm gonna bring the mix slider so we can go parametric and blend the signal in as much as we want to taste but I'm going to use this as my a B my before and after so we'll start before and go after and slowly blend it in and of course just like any other module in Neutron 3 it's completely resizable and also if you just want to target the firepower i've sculptor on one particular area of the spectra just bring in these little sliders here and you can just really focus the kind of special sauce of sculptor to just effect one area I'm gonna widen it though and let's do some before and afters in the mix and I have a little loop here set up [Music] there we go we've sculpted things toward a more ideal version of this guitar let's keep moving through these other tracks here I have a drum bus which on its own sounds pretty good so I've just opened up the kind of mothership just to show you what it looks like when it's hanging out in this sort of larger context in this suite go here and find it sculptor right there and now because this is a drum bus I'm gonna go to the all-purpose folder and add polish is one of the targets that I really like now in case we go into the red which we're seeing on the output here we can always introduce the limiter in the mothership and just control for that a little bit a bit like a protection circuit to make sure that we don't rise above this ceiling that I placed here so let's do some before-and-afters on that now it's something a bit more it's a bit more clear let's do the same for a piano it's a little dull so we'll go to keys and I'm gonna go to piano because that's what we're listening to [Music] now let's brighten it up a little bit and let's do some before and afters there as well so here's before [Music] now it's to a big before and after everything before sculptor and then after so just start the loop turn everything on [Music] so in addition to brightening and situating things within a mix sculptor is also really good at tackling problems like resonance and I'm gonna show you how to tackle that resonance within seconds here's what it sounds like kind of on its own when you open the actual sculptor plug-in you see this preset menu here iZotope is known for amazing and plentiful amounts of presets so we have them here too in addition to the target so if you're trying to pursue an activity like clearing residents just look at the presets to see if one of those things supports that activity and in this case we have right here team resident cell I'll click this press ok and now watch what happens when I play the audio after choosing this preset so it's smart enough using the spectral shaping to identify where the resonance is occurring and just kind of target its firepower in that area but again if we want we can just localize it ourselves even though it's pretty smart it's figured it out by bringing these little arms in but in this case it's left the rest of the harmonics untouched so let's just do some before and afters there [Music] there we go so sculptor is great for situating brightening warming up but also getting rid of problems that could impede you know your mixes tonal balance or get in the way of really making sure that the mix sounds as great as it could possibly sound so it's very versatile great for vocals pretty much anything if you look at the target list we've really developed a number of targets to accommodate pretty much any mix component that you're working with one of the things that Neutron is really known for is the masking meter and masking is when you have perceptual loudness decrease between two elements in a mix there might be competing for the same territory in the frequency spectrum so the classic battle of the ages in this respect is maybe a kick drum and a bass they're kind of occupying the same territory and with the masking meter you can see if masking is occurring and you can also move the parameters around in the eq's to tackle that and make sure that there is less masking or maybe no masking so we do this at iZotope through inter plug-in communication and this is one of the signature features when we launch neutron in Neutron 3 we have changed a little bit about the way that the masking meter works so I'll show you the changes that we've made in this new view here so I'm going to place an instance of Neutron three on the kick and I'll do the same thing on the base so because we have a neutron on the base we don't need to have a kick open and go back and forth and back and forth to EQ them because we can see everything from one of the neutrons so I'll go to the masking meter and I'll go find my kick there it is right there and now we can see the base right here and the kick and we can toggle between them as they play so every time the kick thumps we can see it's orange kind of EQ profile from the basses neutron take another look we can actually go over and see what's happening on the kick track by toggling over to the other tab now I can see the EQ profile and actually affect the EQ profile of the kick from the basses Neutron thanks to inter plug-in communication so the other thing I can see when I'm on my base track is I see the orange profile but I also see some flashing lights we call these our Northern Lights and they're an orange and they indicate we're masking could be occurring so have another look and look for those kind of blips of light that's one kind of visual feedback indicator where things could be kind of overlapping with one another we have another way for you to see this using the sensitivity meter as I increase this you'll see a little histogram little pink columns show up at the top of the screen where some critical areas of masking couldn't be between the two tracks again the nice thing is I can really increase the canvas and fine tune this EQ what I want to make my moves knowing that there's masking going on the histogram is kind of confirmed that the Northern Lights are showing that we have a little bit of activity here at the 100 Hertz mark we could make some decisions about what we want to do we could either go into the kick tract and lower its energy or we can just make room for the kick on the bass track by bringing down some energy from the bass so I'm gonna do just that I'm going to bring this down here and just create a little bit of a pocket see this histogram is showing there's some masking right at that area to make sure that we're not so kind of bumping up against each other between these two tracks now I'm going to go over to the kick and maybe strengthen it where I lowered the base so I'll make the kind of opposite I'll make a mirrored boost and cut here so over here bring this over just widen the cue a little bit really easy to get around the EQ here simple controls this widens the cue you can bring it up we really encourage people with this new UX and UI to go in and just kind of touch the audio and bring it down manipulate it to taste so from here I can make sure that everything's working in context by going over to the bypass eq's and pressing this and this will disable both EQ so I can kind of check my work the kick is coming through a lot more the base has been kind of weakened in that area and as a result I'm not hearing as much masking happening between the two of them so what I did was a little bit of D masking work but I'm gonna show you a way to do it really quickly with the inverse link function which allows you to make a mirrored boosting cut across the two tracks simultaneously I'll show you that works I returned my nodes here to their original States turn on inverse link and now when I dip on the base track you see a little trace line here showing that we're going up on the kick so we've made a mirrored boosting cut and now let's bypass that and see how that sounds [Music] and of course this works with any node so if I want to make a bit of a shelf here on the base for some reason we see the opposite happening on the kick drum so that's a really easy and handy way to make very surgical boosts and cuts across both tracks simultaneously we also have dynamic EQ nodes as well so it's not just static boosting cut we can have these guys react to things happening in other other tracks so I'm going to reset everything and I'm gonna go back to my just reset both eq's here and let's say that I want the bass to go down every time the kick is kind of knocking in that area so I'll go and create a low shelf here or turn inverse link off because otherwise it'll do the same thing on the other side there we go look at that gain trace is there to make sure you can check your work and I'll go to this little partition and I'll make it dynamic which means it's going to react every time signal crosses a certain threshold and what I'm gonna do is sidechain the bass to the kick so every time the kick is active the bass is going to go down to sort of let it through I'll go into logic make the sidechain and put the kick go to sidechain here make it external you get full signal and now let's have a look so now every time the kick is hitting the base is going down I can make the distance traveled a bit more dramatic by going down here and bringing the threshold down even more so now we're going to get some real pumping happening you can also do the same thing on the other side so if we wanted we could actually increase the energy on the kick track without having any side change just using a dynamic node to boost energy in the region that we want so instead of attenuating we can boost I'll show you how to do that so I'm going to go over to my kick track again from my basis Neutron and I'll create with one of these nodes here a bit of a mountain bit of a boost there and now I'm gonna go over to the side make it dynamic and bring the threshold down and I'm gonna instead of making it a ten you wait and go down I'm gonna make it go up by pressing the up arrow so now every time there's energy in that region it's gonna lift it up a little bit have a look [Music] so this is a great way to just add energy thanks to dynamic nodes without having to side chains let's do a little before and after on that I'll bypass the EQ [Music] now we get very focused targeted boosting of this specific area in the frequency spectrum thanks to the dynamic node in the advanced version of Neutron 3 we now have track enhance there's track assistant that's still in the elements and standard version but I want to show off track enhance a little bit on a vocal we have a vocal right here not much on it right now and just disable Neutron so that there's no coloration sounds like this right back worked into 10 I'm committed like that but that might sell the breakers we win it like that we've been working mystery for a minute like that gonna use tracking hands to kind of spruce it up a little bit I'm gonna bring the mothership plugin right here on the track resize it because we can now and I'll go to mix assistant and we see two tabs we have track enhance and balance we don't want to do balance because we already did that at the beginning now we want to focus the kind of firepower of our assistive audio technology on one element of the mix for that we're gonna use track enhance which is gonna listen to the audio and create a custom preset to fit the track I'm going to press next and from here I'm asked a couple of questions users from Neutron 1 & 2 will be familiar with the screen it's changed a little bit namely that we have more instruments that you can choose to get things started the other thing this change is that it speaks to sculptor which is really cool it puts that at the very beginning of the chain which is super helpful we can have it detect what instrument is on this track it's pretty smart I'm gonna leave it on auto detect we could tell it that it's a voice but we'll just leave it on auto we have styles warm balanced up front warm is very low-end heavy balanced is kind of the best of both worlds but a brightness bit of kind of warmth on the bottom and up front is all the firepower on the kind of mid-range and treble so I'll leave it right down the middle and the intensity is how hard we want to push the processing I'm new trying to fit one of these styles here I'll leave it on medium just to kind of play safe here I'll press next and just like with all our assistive audio tech it needs to receive information to know what to do next so I'll press the spacebar get a write backwards in it then I'm committed like that but that might celebrate as you can see it's super transparent telling us exactly what it's doing as it's listening to the audio and interpreting it so it's setting up a signal chain it adds EQ was talking and it's already done so in about 12 seconds it and figure out what instrument type is on there and adjust the settings accordingly as a starting point for you so I'll press accept so I mentioned the machine learning aspect of our plugins here it is manifesting itself it's figured out in the sculpture that we have vocals on the track and it sent the vocal target for us on sculptor it's set any cue over here it's added some nodes where it might have heard some resonance it's added a compressor which by the way looks amazing now in Neutron 3 I'm committed like that but that might send the breakers we win it like that we've been working the street it added another compressor right after and at the last stage and excited just to kind of boost things up a little bit let's have a listen to the before and after here's before get it right back working the 10 I'm committed like that but that might sell the breakers we win it like that we've been working mystery for a minute like that and after getting it right back working it then I'm committed like that but that might celebrate cos we win it like that we've been working mystery for a minute like that but of course this is just a starting point which means you can go in add more bands on the multiband compressor just like that just click to add them if you want exciter is also multi band so we can add more bands being go to the sculptor increase the brightness for example or the intensity of the spectral shaping you did right backwards into 10 I'm committed like that but that might celebrate cos we women like that we've been working the street for a minute like that we could also add another module maybe we want to bring the transient shaper in at the very end it's totally up to you but the point is with the machine learning and assistive audio technology we can build a great custom preset to just help you mix that much faster and more efficiently Jeff that's absolutely amazing the mix assistant the balance I mean all that stuff is just it's just incredible I don't know how you guys do it well we really appreciate that we want to make sure that with every next generation of our plugin it's more revolutionary than evolutionary and means a lot coming from you thank you thank you very much whether you're an experienced mixer or not having a place that spurts you out and gets you going it's just so important and it speeds the whole process up so much I think it's an incredible tool people are really gonna love this thank you very much Mitch for joining thanks for coming out always a pleasure to see you likewise and thank you for joining me for the Sweetwater minute I'm Mitch Gallagher [Music]

Channel: Sweetwater

Views: 167,034

Keywords: itemid:neutron3st, cat:recording, cat:computer, man:izotope, mitch gallagher, mix software, auto mix, how to mix music, izotope neutron 3, neutron 3, neutron 3 advanced, neutron 3 izotope, izotope neutron, izotope, izotope neutron 3 advanced, neutron 3 tutorial, neutron, neutron 3 elements, neutron3, neutron izotope, izotope mixing, neutron 3 review, neutron 3 standard, neutron advanced 3, izotope neutron 3 elements, mixing with neutron 3

Id: ya_LHkABo0c

Length: 31min 14sec (1874 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 06 2019