Logic Pro's Multimeter - the Key to Risk Management For Your Mixes

hey friend chris van der veiver here from wylogyprorules.com the website that helps you get the most you can out of apple's logic pro 10. today i want to cover a topic that i have not had a chance to cover but i really have wanted to especially since several folks have asked me to and that is what the heck is the multimeter and what is it trying to tell you the multimeter is an amazing metering tool that comes right within logic and it combines all the various metering tools into one helpful window if we take a quick look at it right on my stereo output and this is typically where you would place the multimeter and many of the metering plugins in logic on the stereo output so you can see how your whole mix is working if we shrink this down a hair what the multimeter is is a combination of a spectrum analyzer various tools for judging the phase and mono compatibility of your tracks loudness meters level meters i mean everything all in one if we dive into the plug-in menu here and take a look at the metering tools we have correlation meter which is right in the hand side of the multimeter the level meter which is same side loudness meter everything is combined into one and this is so helpful for judging what is going on with your mixes so i want to give you a quick overview of what we're looking at and how i generally use the multimeter to help me make better mixing decisions to start with we should take a listen to this riff that i created over the weekend just so we've got something in mind and then we'll start to dive in so take a quick listen here we go [Music] cool i'm sent on my couch with my laptop came up with something kind of spooky very fitting for the season what we have here is that we have some synths we've got some electronic drums we have you know a synth that's playing as a bass and the multimeter can help us figure out if there are any problems with this arrangement now we are far from a completed mix but we're going to assume that we're pretty close and we're trying to double check some stuff so i'm going to squash this down here and what we're looking at is we have a spectrum analyzer and this is just like your channel eq spectrum analyzer it's telling you how much is going on in the different frequency areas across the entire spectrum from as low as 16 hertz up to 20 hertz and above and we can see the view from zero going down and you can also adjust the scale of the analyzer either by dragging on this top section so we're going further and further down so we're seeing you know negative 40 and below or we can go you know as high as plus 20 so 20 and below down to negative 60. if we go all the way down yeah 120. so i generally leave this at plus 5 just to see if anything's exceeding 0 db and then the range you can adjust as well so we can really get fine here and see you know plus 5 down to negative 14 if we want to look at just the tippy top and if we bring this way up the range of 80 db so we're seeing down to negative 70. so this is providing us with a great view of our mix i mean let's just pick the the busier section here and we'll just watch what's going on here [Music] and we can also adjust this between 63 bands and 31 bands depending on how fine tune you want to get [Music] we can also set the detection to either just the left side just the right side both the left and right combined as if it were a single mono track or the left and right max and then we can choose between an average either slow or fast that would be the rms modes here or peak activity so peak is just like your peak meters the moment by moment level of the different frequencies or we can choose something a little more average [Music] i generally just run with peak and mono because generally i want to look at my entire mix as one and we can also adjust the return rate so check this out if we set this to i don't know 50 db [Music] or 4 db per second [Music] it's pretty cool i mean you can get as fine tune as you want with this multimeter and i would call this a very professional metering tool because not only do you get a spectrum analyzer it's not as fine-tuned as the channel eq or the linear eq but still very helpful but additionally we can also set the peak values and then we can start taking a look at the level meters here [Music] so if you're having a hard time trying to isolate like where is that peak that is bothering you well then set the peak to two seconds or four or six or an infinite and then you'll know exactly where those peaks are cool from here we have you know loudness meters we have level meters level meters at the left and right channels and how loud they are moment by moment and you can actually choose between either peak or rms so we're getting an average or the peak activity peak and rms together and you can even include true peak metering as well which is very important these days when you're mastering your own tracks or mastering other tracks because you don't want to have inter-sample peaks that are occurring even though you set your limiter you know negative 0.3 you might still be getting some activity that's a little louder than you expect first let's take a look at peak and rms this is exactly the same as the level meter in logix so if you just want to break out the level meter by itself you don't have to use the multimeter that's fine and you can set this to as big or small as you need it let's take a quick look so we're seeing a peak activity of negative one which is great because i set my adaptive limiter here to negative one but we're also seeing an average volume of negative 11. so we've got roughly 10 or 11 db between the peak and the average but let's take a look at what the true peak activity might be looking like [Music] isn't that fascinating negative 0.5 negative 0.7 that's interesting since the adaptive limiter is set to negative 1. well let's turn on true peak detection here so we can see if that makes a difference now we've reduced it below negative one but i'm hearing a bit of distortion now check it out if i bring this up to negative three we're gonna see some inner sample peaks [Music] there it is 0.1 so good to know and that's why the multimeter is so helpful it provides us a view of the entire spectrum of this mix we have the level meters we have loudness meters so we can see you know are we hitting that range where a lot of blogs and youtube channels and various sites are telling us where we should be hitting which is roughly negative 14 on the loudness meters and we would be looking at this integrated value and of course you would play this over the entire duration of the song to see you know the entire song stacked up how does it integrate in terms of loudness but for the sake of just being quick let's take a look at where we're at [Music] cool so i mean negative 14 maybe negative 13 and we can play with the adaptive limiter if we wanted to and again we can set peak hold values if we want to see specific values for longer than you know the moment by moment duration so let's set this to infinite just so we can see on the meters here what's going on [Music] cool and we can also set target values for both the level meter and the loudness meter so if you want to say okay negative 14 i don't want to exceed that in terms of loudness cool you can set that and then you can always watch for this and if you see the level exceed this level threshold it'll turn yellow to let you know okay you're exceeding the threshold and i can set the level meter you know if i'm mixing maybe i want to set this to negative three if i'm mastering maybe negative one [Music] cool now we've examined quite a bit now remember this is a demo this is not a mixed track and by looking at the spectrum analyzer i'm getting some ideas on maybe where things are at the kick drum is obviously very loud and you can see that the low end is really pumping above everything else and the spectrum also looks kind of scooped there's not a lot of mid-range activity [Music] now in my mind there would be a vocalist there would be vocals there'd be more instrumentation and thus that would probably fill in a lot of the mid-range activity now maybe the kick is a little too loud so i might want to go to my instrument and turn down kick 2 here by maybe 3 db to try to just take some of the pressure off the low end because it's looking a little too slanted right now [Music] okay so it makes sense right we have a spectrum analyzer to help us identify like what's going on across the spectrum so we're not too top heavy too low end heavy or whatever else we have level meters to help us identify where our levels are hitting are we getting true peak activity or inner sample peaks that we need to take care of by adjusting our output limiter or level we have a loudness meter to help us see if we're hitting that threshold for streaming services and you know now that everybody's telling us stop making tracks so loud are we hitting that like negative 14 threshold roughly depending on the streaming service but the most important part in my opinion of the multimeter is the goniometer and the correlation meter now what the heck is a goniometer what the heck is a correlation meter they're not immediately obvious but they are so important to your mixing life like so very important so let's take a listen to this beginning section here and let's just watch what is going on right here and i'll even bring this a little bigger cool let's check it out [Music] cool there's a red side and a green side and this should indicate to us that one is bad and one is good the green side lets us know that our mix is mono-compatible meaning that if we collapse this entire mix down to a single speaker or a single point of reference nothing's going to disappear nothing's going to sound fazey like everything's going to be there and well represented well the red side says hey there's some phase problems going on there's some imbalance issues going on and when you collapse this to mono you're maybe not going to hear everything the way that you thought you were going to hear everything and that's a mega problem you can see that one of the instruments is bringing us down into the red side during the intro because it's pretty sparse and the synth has a lot of stereo information it's leaning to one side the left side and so we're dipping down into the red now once in a while might not be a terrible thing and you can even double check using a game plug-in on the stereo output so if we just collapse this to mono we can take a quick look and just see you know how does it sound [Music] cool and obviously we're not seeing any action down here because the game plug-in is before the multimeter if i place it afterwards we're gonna see that action again okay cool then when we get into the louder section here everything takes care of itself because now we have drums we have a lot of instrumentation in the center maybe a little too much in the center but our base and our kick and everything that should be in the center is and it reinforces that mono compatibility for the track it's not leaning to one side a little too much [Music] cool so i'm going to bring the game plug-in back turn the mono off now check it out now if we take a look at the goniometer that's also going to let us know about the phase information of our track now phase is very abstract i know but i'll demonstrate to you real quick how easy it is to dissect [Music] so the goniometer is kind of like part two of the correlation meter or vice versa and it's just telling us like what's the distribution from left to right left mid right and are we going a little too far outside the left and right are we creating a stereo situation that's a little unnatural and it's actually hurting the phase of our track and what i love about the goniometer is you can actually set how big or small the display is and you can set the decay as well [Music] i actually like to set auto gain to 100 i like to set the decay basically to 100 so i'm seeing in full view what's going on here now if we take the game plug-in and we phase in for one side against the other so now this track is going to be for all intents and purposes out of phase with itself now check it out watch both the correlation meter and the goniometer [Music] it kind of sounds like your brain's getting sucked out of your ears doesn't it the right side's out of face with the left and so the goniometer instead of basically being straight up and down and kind of floating between left and right it's completely horizontal which is bad news in the correlation meter here you can see it's completely in the red it's just bad news altogether so we know that this track is out of phase with itself and we gotta fix that so obviously we would just do that and we'd be good to go now many of us are not flipping the phase on half of our mix and causing such a problem to our mix but what many of us may be doing is using things like stereo enhancement plug-ins like everywhere in our mix and causing some situations that are not helpful to our mix very often i've seen logic projects where there's a lot of stereo enhancement plug-ins and you know i'm gonna be real with you i rarely touch those things i use it maybe once in a blue moon if i'm mastering a track i'll add a touch of stereo enhancement obviously i'm not saying don't use them i'm just saying use them sparingly because they can cause more problems than they help and to demonstrate this i'm actually going to load up one of the imaging plugins the direction mixer just so we can see what's going on on our goniometer and our correlation meter so we'll start listening to this track and i'll just start stretching the spread [Music] okay so the correlation meter is not living in the red and the goniometer is turning more into a ball of some sort it's really spreading a little too far outside the left and right the correlation meter is jumping around a bit dipping into the res and this is because i've stretched the mix to such a point that it audibly sounds hollow in the middle and it's hurting the phase of our track it's hurting the mono compatibility of our tracks and i've just stretched this out to such a point that it's just not comfortable to listen to and if we throw this game plug in at the tail end and swap to mono check it out [Music] doesn't sound that good get rid of the directional mixer way more stability sounds way more natural for the mix so the whole point is is that the multimeter is an amazing tool and it combines all the different metering tools and logic to give you you know just once and done a view of what's going on with your mix across the spectrum in terms of phase and mono compatibility levels loudness and it's truly a professional tool i love it place on the stereo output and you're good to go so i hope that was helpful for you if it was as always i highly recommend subscribing to the youtube channel why logic pro rules or subscribing on the website itself ylogicprorules.com every week i'm posting new videos new emails and posts to help you get the most you can out of apple's logic pro 10. thanks so much

Channel: Why Logic Pro Rules

Views: 35,028

Rating: 4.9770679 out of 5

Keywords: logic pro x, logic pro, audio, audio production, apple, mixing, audio mixing, recording, audio recording, Logic Pro's Multimeter - the Key to Risk Management For Your Mixes, multimeter, why logic pro rules, correlation meter, goniometer, spectrum analyzer, loudness metering, rms

Id: sAkiD0spG9Y

Length: 17min 32sec (1052 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 22 2020