iZotope Ozone: Why is Everyone In Love With This Thing?

hey there jeff manchester manchester music welcome in this video we're continuing the series on why is everyone obsessed or in love with x plug-in and the plug-in today that i want to talk about is ozone from izotope i'll be honest i have been holding off doing this video for some time for two reasons but before i get into those two reasons come here subscribe subscribe to just do it just hit the bell to get notified when new videos come out just do it subscribe okay okay back back out the two reasons are number one um the scope of this tool there are so many modules it is so comprehensive it is a fully loaded plug-in and i don't want to do five six parts of this video we're gonna do one we're gonna try to cover everything in one so i'm just gonna swallow it the second reason i've been a little hesitant is because um those following at home over the last five years on this channel have maybe noticed that i work for izotope i've worked for him for five years um and that might be weird to some people however i would say that yeah i have worked for izotope for five years i love my job i love what i do but three of those five years i was a product specialist so i had to go out and train people on how to use this tool it means i know a lot about it so i think that makes me kind of qualified to talk about it from an interesting perspective and of course there's no affiliate link there's no i mean you can try it you can do whatever you want okay but there is i think a lot of um evidence that this tool deserves to be in the series because people are obsessed with it and also we're celebrating its 20-year anniversary in the industry and people have been using this to demystify mastering to even mix better it's everywhere so it really deserves a video in this series and let's hop to that video right now all right we are looking at the ozone pro interface now don't worry everything that i'm going to show you in the ozone pro application as of sunday october 24th 2021 can be done in ozone 9 advanced so they are for all intents and purposes very very very very similar i'm just using the latest version of ozone which happens to be ozone pro i want to talk about how we're going to structure this video we're going to talk about clusters of processing there are so many modules in ozone that for me it makes sense to talk about first all the eqs all the compressors all the saturators and then the bells and whistles and then talk about some referencing um and other features that are perhaps a little understated i want to first start by talking about this ui though we can make it smaller we can make it bigger and also if you own ozone pro or ozone advanced you can break out the modules into component plugins so for example if we just want to use the equalizer i can go into my audio effects here in logic go to izotope find ozone and then either ozone 9 right or ozone pro just find the equalizer here and call it up and just use the equalizer so this is one of the features of having the pro or advanced version and also while we're talking about this stuff if you have the advanced version you can use the advanced version in standalone mode so outside of the digital audio workstation which makes sense if you want to just kind of be in your zen mode mastering only not in a daw where you have you know perhaps a temptation to go back and do some mixing stuff um i prefer to work in standalone but i happen to be in the daw for other reasons which will be more evident later in this video so those are a couple things that you just need to know um modules populate left to right we can add them here with the plus sign we can rearrange them if we want we can close out of them and if we do all the way it'll tell us to to build our mastering chain or use the assistant to get started and that's actually what i want to start with the assistant izotope is known for intelligent dsp neural networks machine learning the assistant is one example of this technology built in to help give people a starting point so before we go through all the classes of processing eq's compressors limiters let's start with this guy here now there's three steps we have to choose the kind of sound and modules we want to use as part of our starting point we have to think about the loudness and eq and we have to also give ozone a sense of where we want our master to end up in the wild on a cd or streaming service i'm just going to make sure i have the right track selected here and i'll put it over a point of high energy in this other track here awesome and what i'm going to do is choose modern now if i choose vintage ozone will employ vintage inspired modules like the vintage compressor vintage eq vintage limiter to impart a sound on my starting point if i choose modern it'll go for the modern eq compressor those kind of things give you a cleaner digital sound so let's just choose modern if i go over here to number two i'm being asked you know loudness intensity low medium high this i think corresponds to the lufs minus 11 is pretty hot for high minus 12 and minus 14 here it'll try to aim for that overall integrated loudness target manual a reference if i choose reference i can load a reference track into ozone and it will try to match the loudness of that track and the eq profile of that track and impose it on onto my source track we'll talk more about referencing a little bit later though i'm going to go for manual and i'm going to go for medium this track that i'm using in boca al lupo by mr butler here thanks to mr butler for giving this to me already sounds pretty mastered i think it was pretty close to mastered um so i don't need to go too intense but i'm showing this for you know um for demonstration purposes and we'll choose uh streaming because unless we're in japan or somewhere where cd markets are still popular uh we will choose streaming so it's asking me here to to to play the loudest portion of the tracksum it's representative of the most you know energy so i've i put a loop over here cool i'll press next and then play some audio and the process will get started as soon as the plugin can hear what you're working with [Music] what you're making [Music] so you can hear that we had a bit of a loudness bump there that was the maximizer aka limiter kicking in and now we have to set a vibe for the track so we chose the kind of modules that we wanted to process the track modern or vintage we chose modern now we choose a tone that helps get us in the ballpark of a kind of a vibe here so i'll push this to 175 and let's go through the tone cards and see what they sound like and of course we can tweak them after this but let's go from full to bright and what this is doing is triggering different processing um on the other side of of of the module that we'll see a little bit later let's start with full [Music] what you're making [Music] [Applause] so hopefully you're on a good set of monitors or headphones and you can really understand what's happening sonically as i go through these these cards the d the differences are fairly subtle that makes sense for mastery it's all about micro moves that lead to a great result you know as best we can make the track um so don't expect a too significant a difference i'm going to leave it on balanced and press done and now i'll go over and see what's been done during the listening pass and after i selected that tone card bit of a bump here some sub harmonic frequencies 32 hertz a high shelf here at 17k dynamics turned off this is our multi-band compressor we'll talk more about this in a moment but the assistant is also kind of smart enough to know what it needs to not um do something and in this case it decided not to do any low low end compression with the multiband compressor another eq afterwards one and two this one doing a bit of a kind of a bandpass boost here and then we have a dynamic eq pulling out what could be some you know resonant frequencies so that they don't go into the limiter which is the maximizer at the final stage here and it's set a ceiling of -1 db which makes sense for streaming because there's all kinds of processing that might raise the body of the audio on on the other side so it does this to protect against any kind of you know it's a bit like coffee if you fill your coffee up all the way and leave no room for cream when it gets to the streaming service and they add the cream it'll spill over so we want to make sure we have a little bit of room here for whatever processing might happen afterwards um that's why the minus one was set with uh the streaming preference that we chose earlier so this is a starting point this is how the assistant works just for fun let's go over and choose vintage now and we'll do the same thing [Music] same choices let's just bring this up let's choose bright and see what happens cool so we get the first eq surgical eq and then we have another digital eq we'll talk about this more um not much was done on this side at all 0.1 boost again small moves with eq the compressor was also disengaged this time makes sense same song different module different compressor but it was also turned off another eq to brighten things up a vintage limiter going into the maximizer so we'll talk more about the vintage limiters and stuff in a moment but i wanted to give you both flavors of the assistant and i have so now let's move on to um the first kind of category of tools which are the equalizers i'm going to bring them all up here on screen eq1 eq2 we have a dynamic eq and then there is a vintage eq and finally we have match eq and we're going to talk about them all so this is the first chapter in the eq kind of portfolio of ozone okay so first off this is an eight band eq and i add bands just by hitting the plus button hitting the plus button hitting the plus button hitting the plus button and now we can't add any more bands we have the mini heads-up display which populates here as i click on the individual bands and we can go in here and change the shape of the filter depending on what we want to do where we want to go we have resonant vintage backs and all low pass high pass pretty standard stuff right this is also a contextual eq so if i were to click away from this bring this up this is already a shelf right and this is already a kind of high pass because it's here at the end click these off if i double click i can add a node here if i double click up here i can add a node there of course depending on where you click in the spectrum you will have a different shape because again it's contextual just like some fabfilter stuff and all that we've done in other videos before we can also call up this view which some people might like more we don't get the heads-up displays here we get this kind of bird's-eye mission control view which could be beneficial for some people maybe it isn't but that's another way to view and interact with the eq controls standard eq we have stereo we have mid side and we have left and right so that's pretty handy this is going to be throughout the plug-in we're able to affect just the correlated or decorated channels signals or left and right or stereo together that's pretty common consistent with most you know eqs especially in the mastering realm we also have the option to go between analog and digital filters which is kind of nice i usually hang out with digital when i'm mastering because i want nice and clean and all that stuff but if you want you can go the other route and go for analog filters and if you're using analog filters you might be concerned about phase shifting and that sort of thing go to the options go to the equalizer show extra curves and now you can see the phase response and group delay and phase delay of your moves especially your kind of broad liberal boosts and cuts you can see what's happening to the signal down here which is kind of nice and if you are working in the digital mode you can also pivot between um 100 or zero phase this is minimum phase and linear phase and this is helpful if you find that you know you're hearing or encountering as a result of your um over the top boosts and cuts some pre or post ringing you can bring things down to mitigate some of that ringing or just kind of customize this this is kind of in the weeds here with the controls but i thought i'd show you so that is more or less the eq there's a lot to cover so i don't want to you know tarry uh in one category of plugins or modules over another we also have the ability to scale the amount with this amount slider here or bring it down to zero which is kind of handy and if we want to zero things out just go back to the beginning we just hit this and boom we're at the beginning we've zeroed out all of our moves so that is the eq pretty simple pretty standard we have a second one if we need it we might want to cut with one and boost with another or we just might want extra bands and we can always have these two here and i should also add that every module i mean first of all this whole plugin is full of presets and we go here to get the global ones if you want to get individual module presets just go here okay and you can also preview these in in real time [Music] so second eq same as the first one dynamic eq now this is interesting we have a dynamic equalizer this is to suppress uh certain frequencies dynamically have them react and move to what's happening in the spectrum and we have up and down motion which is really handy just with these two controls we can have it kind of react with some upward [Music] accentuation if you will of certain frequencies [Music] or suppress [Music] and i should also mention that we are able to this is really really nerdy here but if we want to we can move around i don't know why i've gone back to the other eq but i can with my arrows on my keyboard i'm going down by increments i think of like yeah 0.3 db or up or left or right here frequency wise if i hit shift i'm going 1 db and if i hit shift um so up and down shift is 1db and left and right i think this is like 100 or no 50 50 hertz left and right that's kind of helpful if i hit command i can make some very fine adjustments here so i'm holding apple up down left right some people might like this and also option will widen or narrow the cue with the left and right arrows but of course you can do that here like this too with that little handle which is handy let's go back to dynamic eq so let's say we wanted to suppress some energy in this region [Music] bring that down we can change the shape obviously we can also solo you can do this in the other eq as [Music] well depends on how you like to look for stuff you can also have this little flashlight option with option click [Music] you can scrub around the frequency spectrum just so you know you can go over here to the cog and you can go to this and change the filter queue so if i bring this all the way up actually i think it's only for this eq yeah so if i bring this all the way to zero we have a pretty wide kind of ult solo filter queue all the way up very fine but this isn't available in the dynamic eq [Music] so we have some pretty helpful controls here by the way you can do analog and digital you can do mid side left right stereo i'm just going to keep repeating that for people who are wondering we have some nice controls here here for uh controlling you know how sound gets suppressed here via the threshold we can change the attack release you can do um offset here which is it'll set a static gain for the band um we also have auto scale which when enabled it'll display uh attack and release values that are scaled based on the band's frequency value i usually just leave it on if i have to go i'll tweak a little bit here tweak a little bit there and bring my threshold down as needed [Music] so you can have a couple of these going right [Music] so i think we have eight bands here oh no it's six one two three four five six okay we're limited to six bands that makes sense and we'll just pull them all back and that is the dynamic eq i don't think we need to spend too much time in there next up we have the vintage eq now this is based off of the pultec eqp1a and meq5 and it's different right because here we have this parametric you know just pull and slide and double click and add these nodes and here we're kind of back in i don't know the 50s or something and if you want to interact with the eq in this way you can of course pull texts are known for boosting and cutting at the same time people love that and you can do that here and you can do a little mid-cut a 1.5 k and then a high boost at 8 000 cycles with a high q and then a high cut and then a high mid boost so you know you can get pretty uh wild with this thing and uh we have mid side and we have left right i'm just gonna keep repeating that but i i really like to go and play with the um the presets here let me just um bring this up is [Music] yeah so this eq is going to offer a sound way more than these two would uh even in analog mode here let's get rid of those um and this is just for people who like vintage style eq in their mastering chain and some do i suppose i prefer to be as surgical and digital and clean as possible and do a lot of my coloration in mixing but after all people use this tool to mix so why not give them some vintage stuff okay that is the sort of gist of the eqs dynamic 1 2 modern vintage let's move on to one of the more interesting eqs in this tool which is a matching eq very simple to use i have two tracks here in my session which i will use to get this guy going so we have one from dan leibowitz and we have our other in boco in boca al lupo sorry italian people i keep saying boko it's bokeh like you know on a camera that's not funny let me get the cycle going [Music] so that's our other track so let's say we wanted to impose the tonal balance equis of that track onto our track right here so what i'm gonna do is follow the steps here number one capture the reference number two apply it so i'm gonna capture the reference of the song that i you know that i love i just have to have it sound it's eq profile over my track i'm going to play the track press capture and i'm going to wait a little bit to get a really nice kind of you know capture of it [Music] cool i have it it's in yellow or orange and now i'm going to go to a part of my track which is pretty representative of the overall kind of energy i'll go to the chorus here and now i have to capture its spectrum so i'll press play [Music] awesome so in blue we have our source track in orange or yellow we have our reference track we can see right away some differences you know my source track is a little bit brighter here after 10k my reference track is a little hotter here at around 60 cycles 70 cycles so there's some differences which is nice but now we have this gray curve which is kind of cool this is the composite this is like the blended curve and we can fine-tune the amount of mapping of one profile onto the other with the smoothing and amount so the smoothing will determine the amount of precision to apply to the match curve so higher smoothing is less precise lower smoothing is more precise so you'll see as i bring the smoothing down we get this molds right into you know pretty closely the references or you know it takes into account my apply to and reference curve and kind of very closely matches it if i bring it up it gets more diffuse and more kind of wobbly to the point where there's almost nothing going on here so you'll want to see you know what works for you sonically you'll want to play we'll do some examples here in a minute we want to play the sound as you as you move these around and bring the amount in the amount will determine the processing intensity to apply when matching the source curve to the target curve so if i bring this all the way up you know that's pretty intense all the way down but of course that might look kind of crazy but let's use our ears to determine you know exactly what needs to happen i'll bring this amount up i'll bring the smoothing i should double click them to return them to their defaults here [Music] so let's do a little before and after let's uh hit the gain match button and here's the original kind of profile of my source track [Music] so not super dramatic these songs aren't that different tonally but i thought it might be fun to play around [Music] now here's the really cool thing about this tool is that i can use these action regions to focus the matching on just one portion of the spectrum so i mentioned earlier hey the low end on this reference is a bit hotter than mine let's say i like my low end i don't want to mess with i don't want to impose the references low end onto mine i can just drag this up and you'll see we're canceling out the composite curve and focusing the matching just on the high end above 1.4 kilohertz that's really cool [Music] or we can just impose the matching to you know 300 to 2.2 k or 2.2 all the way down to 20 hertz so that's kind of interesting that we can do that and of course we could save this as you know save the snapshot that we captured as a preset and then we can always call it up in later sessions etc so that is a quick and dirty overview of both compressors oh sorry both compressors both eqs dynamic eq vintage eq and the eq or the match eq function in ozone next what i want to do is move on to the compressors and we have two of them we have dynamics this is our multi-band compressor and we also have the vintage compressor over here let's start with dynamics so as ever we can go stereo or we can go mid-side depending on what you like to compress we also have multiband here so that means that i can click here click here and click here and salami this up into different portions of the of the audio of the spectrum so making our jobs a little easier here is this learn feature which will automatically settle the bands um and portion out the different areas of the of the spectrum so i'll just press play and press learn pretty standard right so i can go over here this is blue my controls are blue i can click here i get independent controls for this portion uh in orange or yellow i just canceled that out my bad click here red red green green you get the picture we also have the ability to go in and link the bands so now if i make a move on the threshold and bring this down to you know minus 24.5 decibels i've done that for this high region from around yeah 8.4 k all the way to 20. as i move to the next band my minus 24 is mirrored so this is mirroring all my moves and applying them across all of the bands which i like to do in mastering situations not everyone likes to do it but i i do thought i'd call that out we have limiter compressor some parallel functions here we also have individual kind of band gain to add and we also have this all view which is reminiscent of the view that we had in the eq which allows us to add a bird's eye view just kind of see everything going on right there which could be could be handy for you i'm going to actually disengage this so i want to focus on these two dials right here if we leave tooltips on we can see that this option will automatically have the compressor's release adapting to the incoming signal so you can leave that on or off and this is your kind of auto makeup gain so it'll calculate the amount of makeup gain that needs to happen based on what you're doing here so these are kind of handy little things to leave on if you like to let the uh you know let the the machine do the thinking and the working for you i want to talk a little bit about um oh by the way we have peak um rms and envelope uh detection modes down here pretty stand again pretty standard but i might as well call it out in case people like hey what's what's this for what's happening over here i want to talk about these different views which are handy so this is the gain reduction trace view this is a little bit reminiscent of the maximizer's view as the signal scrolls by we can see the effects of each band on the signal [Music] i have some pretty aggressive just because i was playing around here let me go to a preset analog high end and then go back over here and go to this view so now we're going to see uh what's happening in the the very very low end here from 0 to about 100 hertz in this gain trace view [Music] and if i were to go back and go here i could see what's happening in that portion of the spectrum in this gain trace view [Music] here's one of my favorite aspects of any compressor and especially this one is the detection filter this is what you're feeding in to the compressor and and what's triggering it and i think if you care about your low end you'll employ a high pass or a tilt or something like that here and i say this because usually the low end is the first thing to really trigger the compressor and people mix with a lot of low end these days and so doing this means that the compressor is not going to respond to the low end as much depending on where you kind of set this point which means that the compressor won't be working as hard and maybe causing some pumping or some kind of movement that you don't like maybe you do like it and keep it on but going in here and altering what the compressor hears and what triggers it is kind of nice so i usually will go over here and employ a you know a high pass and just make sure that my low end isn't causing the compressor to work more than it needs to and usually the low end is always the culprit if you hear some wonkiness in your in your compression so that's what that's for and you can also solo you know to hear what's what's coming in especially what's coming in after you use one of these filter shapes okay so that's what that does so very quick and dirty overview again you can solo the module here you can call up its module specific presets it's all pretty much up to you i will say that when i'm mastering i usually do not do a ton of multi-band stuff and if i do i will link all the bands so that everything is happening across each slice of uh of frequency or i'll just use one kind of plain jane compressor or i won't use compression at all uh depends on what i need to do but ozone is pretty feature rich so you've got a lot of options if you do want to slice things up and go to town and go nuts with the compressor let's move on to the vintage compressor which is sitting right over here i don't want to spend too much time in here because it's a very simple kind of place to be we have fewer controls because this is vintage and we also have these modes which is really where the action is on this plugin we have our auto makeup gain we have some gain we can do manually we have attack release ratio threshold and this detection filter and we have this nice gain trace view and of course we can do our processing in stereo or mid-side so if i mouse over these with tool tips on we can see little descriptions greater emphasis on dynamics dynamic transients for a tight percussive sound balanced is signal dependent blend between dynamics and overall body of signal and smooth is greater emphasis on the body of the signal so i always tend to go for balanced and smooth why don't i just play some audio and i'll cycle through these guys and you can use your ears to see what they sound like and what you like [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] but you're making [Music] anyway that makes up the two compressors in ozone vintage and let's just say modern now i want to talk about the next classification of processing which is exciters saturators okay we have i would say three the first is the exciter module the second is the uh vintage tape okay and the third and this might be a bit controversial is the low end focus which is a whole other category of processing but i think it does something similar to saturation on a spectral level that is you know worthy of it being included here in this class of of tools so starting with the exciter we have four bands of configurable saturation with a bunch of modes to really allow you to go in there and customize your sound we have two views um and what i want to do is just kind of hang out here in this main view i believe this view will roll out high end undesirable high end from the from getting saturated which is pretty common you'll see that on decapitator you'll see that on a bunch of other plugins too i'm going to leave it where it is here because i just i want everything to be saturated for the sake of this example i'll get my bands going here and of course we can always press learn and it'll set them accordingly for me [Music] as ever guys stereo or mid side and we have this button here over sampling this is going to hit the cpu a little harder than you know if you didn't have it on but what this is going to do is protect against digital distortion aliasing which can sometimes happen with saturation plug-ins so that's just there let's leave it on and i want to go through each one of these different modes here and we'll listen and talk through them but actually what i want to do is go to the other song which is a little bit better in terms of you know candidates for saturation [Music] awesome so let's start here let's actually zero these bands out and what i want to do is just have one and we can hear you know the overall saturation sound let's start with analog which is the first one this emulates the sound of transistor type odd harmonics giving they say a driven grit to your audio and we can blend the amount up like this and then we can kind of mix in an amount to taste like that so what i usually do what i'm mastering is i'll leave it like somewhere like around here like pretty conservative numbers but let's get a good level going so we can get a good demo level and then i'll go through all the uh the filters here [Music] the modes rather [Music] so we're starting to get a lot of toughness let's um i'm going to zero these guys out and let's do a before and after on analog [Music] so some fuzz some crunch i'm going a little hog wild okay with this but we're just demoing okay don't write in the comments like i would never use that i'm just demoing this and a lot of people actually use this on mixing you know to overdrive guitars and things like that so that is analog retro is the next one up this is based on the characteristics of transistors slowly decaying row of odd harmonics let's have a listen to that i'll bring them out in [Music] again get yourself some good headphones and have a listen to this before and after [Music] a lot of fuzz a lot of thump a lot of pump by the way if you want a bit of a cheat code to understand and listen to saturation excitation whatever you want to call it drums just listen to the drums the drums will tell you what's going on let's keep moving here to the next one which is tape hey we know what tape is it offers a brighter sounding saturation due to the odd harmonics found when saturating analog tape let's bring it in [Music] before and after [Music] a little goes a long way doesn't it folks let's go next to warm which is you know only even harmonics that decay super quick [Music] okay last two we have our triode and dual trio these are model after uh tube circuits [Music] again drums really give this one away i love triode and dual triode but listen to the snare the punch the snap it's pretty uh it's pretty awesome [Music] finish off here with dual triode models a full circuit using a vacuum tube introducing a more pronounced overdrive with warmer with a warmer tone [Music] okay so a couple more things turn the bands on boom we can link the bands like this so now they all kind of come up or they all go down which is helpful let's move over to uh vintage tape i just want to do a quick call out though these presets are among some of my favorite if you're if you're going overboard or struggling to know how much you know saturation to add these are amazing because they incorporate some mid-side stuff which is always fun to saturate so let's turn this off and go over to vintage tape now this is inspired by an a810 two-track studer tape deck but it's it's it's a lot more than that obviously because we're in the digital domain and we can play with stuff and change the ips inches per second right this is the speed of the tape machine 75 they say adds warmth by emphasizing the signal's low end 15 adds a distinct body and thickness and 30 is more subtle higher fidelity lower noise let's bring up the input drive and see if we can hear the differences in speed [Music] so listen to the before and after and again the drums always give it away [Music] so it's almost like we're squashing them we're compressing them it's really it's really impressive let's go to 30. [Music] okay input drive higher levels lead to more saturation lower input reduce the added saturation in tape emulation so when we go a little all the way over here i mean this is really supposed to emulate to a degree the non-linearity of of tape and saturation so it gets pretty crazy if we go all the way up i wouldn't recommend going too high with this [Music] okay so the bias so let's listen to positive and negative bias here um if i go high this will boost the higher frequencies similar to an under-biased tape machine [Music] let's move on to harmonics this will introduce um odd harmonic saturation and if we go above we have even [Music] again drums always give it away have a listen [Music] so low emphasis high emphasis uh this controls the shape of the resonant peak this is sometimes known as head bump in decibels which adds some gain or a general peak to base or kick drum material uh so if we leave it at two which is the default by the way double clicking will always return so the default this allowed a very subtle amount of head bump pushing it to higher limits though can give you low end power [Music] [Music] so this year the high emphasis this is the compensate for any high frequency loss gives your gives your sound some energy [Music] so just one view we can't do mid-side or anything we're just hanging out here in one very simple interface let's keep moving to low end focus okay so low in focus is really interesting this is one of the newer modules in ozone and it's become a bit of a favorite i've seen among like producers like hip-hop guys and stuff and what it does is it will go in and listen to um the spectral content think about a spectrogram in rx and find the low end spectral information and increase its contrast to everything else so it's not a shelf it's not uh you know it's it's not uh you know unmixing or something like that with music rebalance it's going in listening to the spectral information and just increasing the contrast with everything else and there's two modes all this will make more sense in a minute here it's just tough to describe this module because the processing is so novel i think it makes more sense to kind of listen to it and of course we can go stereo or mid side here this action region is like where i'm going to get i'm focusing my processing which is from 20 to 300 hertz which is where a lot of you know bass and kick drum and snare and that kind of stuff lives there's two modes okay punchy and smooth punchy is you know in my mind this accentuates snap of the snare the thump of the kick transient information smooth i find will increase the contrast of more sustained stuff like a sustained bass note or maybe a sub synth or something happening and you turn this up and that really kind of accentuates and separates from the rest of the mix and brings the low end into focus so to speak so we can increase the contrast or lower the contrast this is really helpful because if we find that there is too much contrast already between the low end and everything else we can actually bring it more flush with the rest of the mix if we find that you know there's there's too much and this is kind of like oak soothe where people recording poorly or with bad mics or whatever we tame the resonance a lot of stuff has just so much low end and if we want to de-emphasize it pulling down the contrast is often very helpful i'm gonna bring up punchy and we also have this gain thing here which allows us to kind of like um yeah make up gain but i'm gonna leave this off and just bring this up for now listen for the kick and the snare [Music] and listen when i take it away the snap of the snare is not so pronounced [Music] and i can solo to see just what's happening over here [Music] so i'm really just getting the bottom of that snare not so much the top which is maybe further up here so let's now go to smooth and listen for the sustained bass note that happens a little bit after this little break and how it kind of comes up and level and also the sub elements really come out the sustained sub elements come out too with the smooth engaged with a contrast of 61 [Music] here comes the note [Music] that is low in focus that's what you would use it for we have now talked about the saturators the compressors the eqs and the assistant i want to talk now about the imager which is one of the most beloved modules in this tool and also one of the more kind of misunderstood so the imager allows you to adjust the stereo width of your mix using multiband of course stereo imaging okay and so i've added some bands we can also use the learn to position them helpfully [Music] we also have a phase correlation meter as part of a vectorscope there's three different ways licious polar level and polar sample [Music] and if you ever see this little blue dot trending downward below zero that's when you know that you might need to rethink your panning structure or be less liberal with your moves so we will keep an eye on that as we as we make moves so we have a couple different ways to see what's happening i like this view the most to check on phase so if we were to dip into the red in this trace that would mean that we need to kind of rethink some of our width choices let me see if i can trigger that so it happens [Music] so when those guitars go away and we're just left with drums and everything we start to get into the red there which is bad there's also some information here telling us that we are we're in trouble here so listen as i as i go to uh bring this to mono how much disappears [Music] so this lets us know that we're in danger here of some bad phase business so just helpful metering is always helpful let me close these down of course we can hit this bring them all up bring them all down we can also zero them out up here on the top right that's super helpful let's bring back our little guys over here and we can bring up the individual width of each band like this [Music] get out of mono jeff [Music] a little bypassing here [Music] so pretty simple we're just adding width here we can see it was a zero correlated to decorated and we can bring that up and that's helpful and we can hear and see what's happening we have the stereoized feature as well which will add natural sounding stereo width to narrow recordings and you can also get these two different modes which is helpful i would stay with mode number two it's the newest one it's better able i think to preserve transient information which often gets kind of smeared as a result of stereoizing so let me just zero these bands back down turn this on and have a listen [Music] now again i'm pretty liberal here with the stereois feature so let's look at the let's do the trace [Music] we got to be careful [Music] and by the way this works stereoize works on mono stuff and should play back without introducing any kind of nasty artifacts but that is essentially the imager this is one of the most popular tools in this plugin if i go over here i can get some very very nice presets come on now logic [Music] so [Music] when i'm in a sub menu and i i stop playback and logic i get this weird flash on the screen that's like i don't know what you're doing stop so i need to kind of go back and press something in logic to cancel that out so anyway that is the imager great on individual instruments great on a mix or a master in small doses now i want to talk about one of the more futuristic tools which doesn't really fit into any kind of pressing category per se it's kind of very very new and so it's tough to talk about it and slot into one of the groups it is music rebalance which is essentially unmixing and this allows us to go in and lower or raise the gain by nine decibels up or down of the vocals the bass or the drums it's pretty incredible it works really well and it's really nice for people who don't want to bring up or down things with compression because usually something is sacrificed when you employ dynamics processing to reduce the severity of something or if you're using eq even in a very targeted fashion to bring up the drums or up the vocal a lot of other stuff is going to come along with it even if you have a super narrow cue and that might start to get kind of ringy and bad so this allows you a very transparent way to raise or lower elements of the mix and it's also great if you don't have you know time to go back and mix it again but you just want to bring the vocals up you just want to bring the bass up it's pretty amazing so i'm going to loop things around here in this last section and bring up the vocals and then down and then the bass and the drums also and we're going to get this blue trace which represents the source the focus and everything else is kind of the composite view of the track overall [Music] you try [Music] in reality we'd only want to bring this up like one you know like one dp or something [Music] what you're making [Music] pretty amazing let's do bass now [Music] the thing that always blows my mind is that it does not bring up the kick drum the bass kick bass or whatever it only brings up the bass the bass synth or bass guitar we'll hear the kick drum come up in the drum section but that just always blows me away it knows the difference between the two let's do drums [Music] that's pretty amazing in in my life i think um cool so let's go over to another kind of out of the box piece of dynamics processing that doesn't really fit into what we're talking about um categories clean categories and that's a spectral shaper perhaps you could say this is an eq it is a special shaping this is a i think 72 spaced 72 mil spaced kind of compressor equalizer which gently applies compression across this action region and why is this important well if you've got a track that is tinny or splashy or sour especially in the high end you don't have a de-esser eq is a bit too aggressive use something like this to go in and really tame some harshness it's pretty transparent and it allows you a couple different modes i believe these are the ratios light is let's see here yeah one point five to one two to one and four to one again this is a compressor of sorts after all so we have ratios tone attack and release and the threshold the point at which the processing starts happening once the signal crashes crosses the threshold and we can listen to the threshold which is pretty helpful so i don't really have a great let me see if i can add some eq here just to get things um just to cheat a little bit and add some harshness [Music] [Music] that's pretty you know i'm exaggerating a bit of a bump here to bring out the the high end of this track to then tame it with the spectral shaper but here's how it works [Music] bring the threshold down i solo to go over the area that has the harshness that's good there and now i'll bring this down [Music] again this isn't the best candidate but you get the picture it's softening things up a little bit we can control the tone of the shaping i believe make it darker or brighter the attack the release we have mid-side processing or stereo processing i didn't come prepared with an example for this so please forgive me but that is what the spectral shaper is all about a little bit like low end focus when i talked about too tubby a low end we can bring this action region down here and tame or soothe some of the low end with some gentle uh you know compression with the spectral shaper so that is what the spectral shaper is for okay let's move on to the next category of processing which is limiting so there's two limiters in ozone a vintage limiter and then the maximizer let's talk first about the vintage limiter so this limiter is modeled after the fairchild 670 and it's very simple we have a couple of bells and whistles but again just like the vintage compressor we have these different modes and if i mouse over them with my tooltips on tight bass response for analog smooth feedback limiter with modern precision for tube and modern is vintage limiting with increased clarity and presence let's get our ceiling going over here i guess we could do it on this side too but um and go through each one of the modes [Music] what you're making again it's getting pretty squashy but again i have already mastered this track so we're not going to get a huge benefit i think from from limiting but i might as well hang out here in the vintage module so those are the modes true peak what is this well during the um d to a conversion there can sometimes be overages that that happen so when you enable true peak you're looking at all the digital samples and the plugin is making an estimation of what the levels might be after the d to a conversion and accounting for that and giving you a sense of hey um we're going to look at all the peaks we're going to control all the peaks so by enabling this we can get a more accurate representation of what the levels might be after that conversion the trouble though is that this does incur a bit of a cpu hit okay so when you turn it on just be aware and you can even see my cpu kind of going up as i turn it on fills up and when i turn it off it it goes back down a little bit so just be aware of that we have a character slider here which i believe controls the attack and release times of the limiter which are also kind of proxied and controlled by these different modes so that is in a nutshell the vintage limiter let's go to the mack daddy of ozone which is the maximizer this is again one of the most beloved limiters of all time i think it's safe to say that it's up there with the l2 and other limiters digital limiters it's very very comprehensive i would say you know if you want more information please read the manual and use this thing yourself i want to hang out in the modes over here which are i think the thing that attracts people to this tool irc stands for intelligent release control i'm going to describe these guys a little bit and play through them but there's a lot and so i don't want to spend this entire time reading and talking i'd rather spend this time playing stuff back and you guys listening to how these sound i think that's more useful um thing to do and because we've already kind of mastered this track i'm going to go to the other track which is a little bit more of a candidate for mastering here [Music] so irc the first one here ll stands for low latency so this is uh they say it provides the intelligent digital loudness maximization of irc one with lower latency irc one is right over here so let's bring the threshold down [Music] let's bring in irc one which if we thumb over it smooth and thick limiting for a rich sound [Music] and note that i have gain match enabled guys this is just so we don't think oh it sounds so much better irc3 or 4 or whatever because it sounds louder no gain match will match the output and input so all we're getting is the vibe and character of the ircs and not the gain jumping up so please use good headphones or monitors to really understand the sonic differences each irc imparts on on the track [Music] so irc2 is meant to preserve the trambian transients even more and it says clear and sharp limiting to preserve peaks so let's have a listen to that bypass before and after [Music] one of the things that's coming out to me is just how transparent irc2 is um i'm really not hearing a huge difference if you want a difference there's other modes uh to choose from but that is very transparent and of course as we move up all of these irc's we are going to see the cpu kind of going up because they will you know tax the system a little bit more especially as we go to uh irc3 and irc4 and the different modes within them okay so irc3 let's mouse over uh surgical limiting tailored to your audio we have balanced pumping and crisp and clipping by the way irc3 and pumping comes from i think ozone five that was one of the legacy presets so let's listen to pumping [Music] let's switch over to the next one balanced [Music] crisp [Music] definitely getting a much more open sound when i un bypass and hear that thing um yeah crispier [Music] hopefully you guys are hearing that too and let's go to clipping [Music] so this is a super aggressive style you hear that colorization right and that distortion [Music] let's go to irc4 starting with modern they say this provides general enhancement and life to your mix but with greater detail and clarity than the classic style let's do it [Music] let's go to classic [Music] actually really really like classic there's a subtle openness there that i like and let's go over transient which is optimized they say for maximum preservation of all transients resulting in a highly detailed overall sound that may benefit some mixes needing added clarity let's check it out [Music] so [Music] so okay so those are the irc's we have a ceiling we have a threshold we know what a limiter does we talked about true peak we also have the attack and release controls more or less of the maximizer which we can control over here okay so i think it would take way more time than i think i want this video to be to talk about stereo independence suffice to say that you can control how the limiter behaves with transient or sustained information across the channels by moving this around and you can also unlink them i'd say you know this is super techy but use your ears you might get a louder overall mix at the risk of you know a less wide signal depending on how you manipulate these but just for the sake of this video we could spend an entire hour on stereo independent independence and i really don't want to so okay so if you want to preserve your transients while still optimizing for loudness you'll want to turn this on and adjust the amount if you go for a higher amount this will result in more pronounced transients after the limiting process so for people that are worried about crushing or smashing their transients this is here almost like a makeup gain emphasis for those transients i doubt we'll hear too much of a difference if we go before and after but let's just play with this amount and see if we can get a sonic difference [Music] so before and after [Music] so i am hearing a bit of something i'm hearing the snap of the snare a bit more than i am otherwise but i would say you've got tools to shape the sound of the transients prior to anything you know in the limiting stage like music rebalance or low end focus so this is maybe an extra thing if you still encounter some smooshing or squashing in the maximizer stage there's one more tool in here called learn threshold which is pretty handy if we want we can tell ozone to dynamically adapt the threshold to a target here integrated l ufs target so i let's say i want you know i wanna hit around minus nine l ufs i'll hit play press that button [Music] and now this is the threshold setting for us to hit -9 or thereabouts okay and then when we export we know that we're around -9 l ufs this is not going to be up to broadcast code so don't don't use it if you want to hit a certain spec but let's say we wanted to go really hot okay minus 5. [Music] so that's insane but it's going to dynamically adapt and make sure that we hit -5 when we export and pop it into like waveform stats and rx or something like that so that just about rounds out the or rounds out the maximizer portion i want to talk a little bit about what's happening on this panel here because this panel is also pretty powerful we have a number of i o options here we can change the type of metering from integrated to peak rms in peak bobcats is k-system single peak momentary integrated short term short term and max peak and of course as we cycle through them [Music] we get different viewing options [Music] i tend to leave it over here at [Music] where do i leave it normally i think integrated that's where i leave it [Music] we also have the option to have the meters tell us you know what's happening on the mid side or in the stereo field [Music] that's pretty handy there's a couple of features down here which are really interesting so we can replace the input with a reference that we load in which i want to talk about in a minute and we can actually show the reference eq spectrum which is really handy so first let's load a reference into ozone so what i'm going to do is find this track by dan call it up and here's a really cool thing that happens it automatically segments things into these different a b a into using machine learning it'll go oh that's a chorus that's a verse and we can draw out the loop points a little bit like this [Music] let me go back to my other track so this makes a lot more sense so when i hit this button we're going to hear the loop that i made or the ozone made there's my other track that's playing in logic right now [Music] see the playhead [Music] go over here and play this [Music] so let's say i want to do some referencing and i want to make my track sound like never you mind by dan i could adjust its gain to make sure it's a bit closer to the gain of my track in logic another thing that might help me address that gain is if i knew what the gain of that track was of dan's track i can go here in the i o i can go replace input with reference so now the input is going to be dan's track and the output is going to be my loudness [Music] so that's dan's track and i can see that it's a little bit a little bit hotter bring down the game [Music] so that's pretty handy so now i can go over here and let's say i wanted to see dan's spectrum over mine i can go to i o i can go show reference spectrum so now i don't really have to hear dan's song i can see it spectrum in my eq [Music] so the spectrum that is um hollowed out that's dan's track the one that's full is my track full and gray so now i can see both [Music] so that's a pretty handy referencing tool and i can eq my track to his or whatever using my eyes and my ears or i can go over here to the match eq and do it a bit more automatically the other thing that i can do now that i have a reference loaded in is go to the assistant and then go hey i want you ozone to match the loudness and eq profile of dance track uh or take it and impose it onto mine so i can do that now [Music] but you're so now i can kind of listen to see how they compare [Music] that does sound much brighter which is awesome and the loudness is the same let's go to the input meter and make sure it is more or less [Music] looking at these numbers here minus 11 minus 12. minus 14 minus 11 yeah pretty close [Music] cool so that makes up the referencing features in ozone i want to call out another kind of cool thing if i click here i can actually go through all of the moves that i made throughout this entire video and go all the way up to all of my you know all the moves and i can also audition different presets and things so if i wanted to click on this bass bus control i could load that into set a and then load this other preset into set b and just go back and forth to see what these presets sound like and you can see that it's changing things in real time so let's hear this you know this is a very weird example but you know let's hear um the all synth bus and then let's go over to base di and see what that sounds [Music] like so i can i can sample entire not sample but i can load entire preset snapshots or if i just want to see what does it sound like when i bring the imager up a little bit you know like this or if i want to bring you know all of them in like that i could load this into set a and then this one into set b and just audition those two things like that right [Music] so that just about does it i want to talk a little bit more about these settings over here we have the reference panel which we talked about which is super cool i think you can bring it in up to 14 or 16 tracks there which is helpful we can swap the channels left and right we can sum to mono i'm not even going to talk about dithering but if you if you're worried about div dithering this is the module for you and you go to the documentation and read all about it but we also have this codec preview which is really handy so what this allows you to do is preview what's going to happen to your audio once it's you know truncated from a loss less to lossy process so going from like wave to mp3 or wave to aac or aiff to aac what happens is a lot of information is discarded to make that stuff fly around the internet and stream a little faster and slicker and stuff so you can actually go in and preview what's going to happen and what your sound is going to sound like and maybe make some moves to compensate for that if that that happens to be the case all the way down to 96 kbps up to 32 or 320 i'm running out of steam here guys sorry and you can also solo the artifacts of each kind of format which is super helpful so what i'm actually doing right now with these solo artifacts is i'm hearing the data that's lost as a result of the codec conversion so this is what's lost at 320 if i go all the way down to 96 that's a lot of information that's lost listen to how horrible that sounds if we ever get uh taken down to 96 kbps [Music] we can actually preview uh our nice full sound versus the codec bitrate uh one [Music] [Applause] okay so i think that just about does it for this huge mammoth walkthrough of ozone we have global presets here as well um i believe this is undo we have our our history module here you can go to the settings and you can also click this and you'll be taken you'll be taken to the documentation i don't want to click it because we'll go out of this video and onto my browser but this is a deep deep plug-in i probably didn't even cover everything but hey i tried thank you and let's see you on the other side of the uh the daw okay we did it um what did you think uh do you have it are you curious to use it um let me know in the comments as always thank you for watching and being here like subscribe share all that stuff and i'll see you in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Manchester Music

Views: 35,290

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Id: RvefXuc2uy4

Length: 87min 36sec (5256 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 01 2021