Mixing with AI: Sonible Vs IZotope

will AI replace our audio engineering friends or maybe you're wondering will AI make my music sound better well I'm hoping to answer some of those questions in today's video so I've recently put out a song called cinematic and I've shown the making of that song using only free vsts and I'll put a link of that if you haven't seen it somewhere above me but for today's video what I'm going to do is I'm going to look at both isotope and sonable and I'm going to look at their smart machine learning capabilities to see if can mix and master track as good as me now I do want to put out a disclosure I'm not a mix and mastering engineer I have a pretty darn good understanding of sound design I have a good understanding of how to mix and how to EQ and how to do Dynamic processing but I'm by no means a mixed and mastering engineer I'm a producer and a music composer and I know that the people who watch my videos maybe some of you come from a background where you're really good at composing music maybe you're a beat maker and you still don't quite might have the capabilities to mix and master your songs properly so you've wondered can I use Isotopes ozone or Neutron to mix and masterm songs with their assistant or maybe you looked at sonable smart eq4 or smart eq3 and smart comp and smart limiter and said man can it do all these things for me well I'm hoping that this video will answer those questions cuz I'm going to put them up against a human all right so we're going to start by comparing sonal smart essential Suite first and then we're going to compare Isotopes music production bundle it's not going to be a perfect example but it's going to give you an idea just how much value these tools add to your Arsenal so I have all of the individual channels being grouped to various buses so we have an F bus drum bus instrument bus strings bus choir doesn't have a bus and the 808 doesn't have a bus so uh I'll apply it to those specific channels but the rest the strings are all grouped together I have metric AB loaded up as well and this has the track with my mix that I've distributed to the various music streaming services by the way if you do want to stream this song I'll make the link available in the description if you're interested so just for reference as you can see here as I play the song I Can toggle back and forth between the FL project and my mix so we can compare so right now it's playing the FL project and then we can switch to my mix now you'll notice my mix is a lot louder that's because I've done all of the final limiting and uh processing on the master channel before I distributed it so we're going to do that let's jump in and then see how it Compares once all of those plugins have been added all right so I've loaded the smart EQ on each and every bus Group and I've loaded the smart comp on each and every bus Group as well on the master I've loaded the smart EQ the smart comp and then the Smart Limit so I have the compressor threshold set to zero right because I don't I don't want to do any mastering compression at the moment and also for the limiter I'm not pushing any gain I'm just setting a a threshold at zero uh we're going to get to the actual settings after once we actually play around with it same thing for the EQ it's flat so there's no EQ being done so with that being said the first thing we have to do is let's create a group called bus Group and add all of these bus groups to the group within the smart eq4 so this is one of the benefits of the smart EQ is you can create groups and then you can prior ize certain channels within those groups to say hey I want this channel to be on the Forefront I want this one to be in the mid I want this one to be in the back and then it could use its AI algorithm to apply different EQ settings on each one of those channels so let's see how that's done so now when it's going to use its algorithm it's going to prioritize and make Dynamic changes to each and every one of those eqs you'll see in a second and it's also going to make additional adjustments based off of if it's front middle or back so right now what I have to do is Click learn all and let's play the song somewhere where all those channels are being [Music] played so now it's learned every channel we're going to categorize each individual one and it's again going to make certain adjustments based off of what we tell it it is so let's let's give it a go and see the adjustments it [Music] made let's bring the strings [Music] down no let's do this actually now I'm [Music] thinking [Music] so just to explain for those who aren't familiar with this so essentially what I can do is I can click on various instances so because I have the FX bus it's showing the FX bus right here at the top that's the primary EQ maybe I should open a different one let me open string bus so now the string bus is the primary EQ if I click on any other one I can see the adjustments that it makes on those one thing you'll see here it says mode mode I can see it on all of them if I close the group View and go to the individual one you'll see mode as well what mode does is it adjusts where it makes EQ changes to your channel based off of two things one says TR and gr track in group track is essentially you tell it what this is so I said hey this is a string bust this is a cello So based off of its machine learning algorithm they say well based off of the input signal as well as what I know what strings or what a cello should sound like here's the EQ I'm going to apply to it the other thing you'll see here it says gr that's group in addition to the track changes that it applied so the EQ changes that it applied based off of the setting I've selected the profile I've selected it also makes EQ changes based off of where it is within the group so if it's first it'll make certain frequencies that it sees as fundamental frequencies it'll boost those if I push it to the back it'll start to duck some things if there's any sort of masking happening so if there's frequency masking happening and let's say my strings are playing over my 808 I Saidi want the 808 to drive this beat it's going to take priority for the 808 and boost certain frequencies and it's going to duct them on any that I put in the middle or at the back so I'll show you that once I go back to group I've selected the 808 and the strings so right now the strings are in the middle but watch what happens if I put the strings up uh take a look at the EQ at the top see how it boosted certain frequencies and then it actually ducked a little bit out of the 808 because now it has to share that frequency spectrum with another Channel if i p pull it down you see now the cello started ducking on the low end and the 808 started being bumped up a little bit on the low and so I'm not going to make any EQ adjustment because the whole purpose of this is to compare how the algorithm changes things and not how I change it because I would go in and start to fiddle I just want to compare how it by itself just me slapping these things in how does it sound compared to the way that I mix it so if you're interested in how frequency masking works and how to unmask certain frequencies and create a better balanced mix I've created a video for it and I'll have it up somewhere above me if you're interested check it out now the EQ has been applied let's apply the [Music] compressor all right so now I've learned all of them and after learning them I've set each profile so for my drum bus I said this is a drum bus for my 808 I said it's Bas so let's see how it sounds like uh with the compressor as well as the smart [Music] EQ so I moved some of the order of these things because after adding the compressor their smart compressor just compressing the heck out of some of these bus channels but again the poll purpose of this is to see does their smart algorithm make better decisions than me so I don't want to fiddle with it too too much let's go to the master and run it through the smart eq4 again smart comp and Smart Limit and here we can say hey this is a hip hop let's set it to trap mix for the smart comp let's say this is a hip hop mix we'll say learn and here we'll say learn as well and then in the Smart Limit we'll say this is hip hop Golden Era so now it's going to listen to everything that's happening on the master channel it's going to do some compressing some eqing and some limiting let's see all right so did it's learning let's see the mix that we [Music] got let's do some AB [Music] testing [Music] so right off the bat I can really hear the compressor it seems like it's almost if you have good headphones you almost hear like a wave of compression it's almost like a goes in and out depending on how much Sonic information is happening it's almost like you can audibly hear a do its thing I'm sure I can make changes to it so it gives you a good starting point so I I want to be very clear I'm not knocking the plugins uh I think they're great plugins which is why I bought them but if you're strictly dependent on its AI capabilities this gives you an idea of how well does this machine learning algorithm when you select all the parameters how well does it compare to an actual person and again for me I'm not a professional mix and mastering engineer I'm a composer producer I understand sound very well I can mix I can Master but that's not my day in and day out I like to make music all right so let's compare Isotopes music production Suite to my mix so just a disclosure I have music production Suite 5.2 I believe it is which has ozone 10 and neutron 4 so I know ozone 11 is out I don't think there's enough benefits for for me to upgrade my ozone because these are paid products I bought these products I did not get sponsored to be honest with you there was not enough benefits for me to to upgrade it so I still have ozone 10 which has most the same capabilities as ozone 11 minus a few new features so I have ozone on my master Neutron 4 which is in the new music production Suite as well so they did not upgrade Neutron so uh this is up to date ozone's out of date by one version so I'm going to set each bus Group I'm going to set them to uh start listening for audio and then see what kind of mix it gives me all right so now it's learned everything and unlike sonal we do not have a grouping feature here so I have to load all six of my neutrons that I have on the bus groups in one window so hopefully this does not overwhelm you but I hear my strings 808 choir instrument drum bus and then effects bus so let's see did I get the things right so for my strings it says instrument other for my base 808 it detected that its base uh choir did not detect that it's vocals so let's put it as vocals U my instruments other that's fine drums detected that it's a drum bus and effects I don't think there's anything that they have for effects so let's play and see what it gave us no no bottom end on that one wow W those strings sound flat my goodness wow I do have to say this is a lot more resource intense as well I'm looking at my CPU it jumped up to like 60 so definitely Neutron is a lot more resource intense than sonable but that kind of makes sense because it's using more modules as well so whereas with sonable I had just an EQ and a compressor this has sculptor which which sculptor is an Adaptive EQ so as your song plays it adapts the EQ and tries to make the configuration whether it cuts things or boost things on the Fly uh as it processes that signal then it goes into an actual EQ then a compressor one compressor two and then Exciter which is Distortion harmonics it adds saturation and and character to each signal and if I'm not mistaken yeah this is I guess when you use their assistant that's the modules that it uses even though neutron has a lot more modules so I have another transient shaper I have a gate but this is the order of modules that it gives you it gives you a adaptive EQ at least I think that's what they classified as a static EQ maybe there's some Dynamics there yep this filter right here is dynamic two compressors one is modern this one is punch let's see compressor here this one's vintage this one's punch so I guess it chooses the compression style and amount based off of whatever profile you used right after that I just got to say I do not like what it sounds like let's play when it kicks in let's [Music] see I want to fiddle with it but I'm not going to because the whole point is to compare its assistant with human capabilities so let's go to Ozone I'm going to set it to learn let's play Let's see what we [Music] got [Music] okay so now that it's heard my mix it's learned it and it believes it's rock so that's wrong let's say hip-hop rap and the reason the profile is important as you can see there's a tone so there's a a a frequency range for the lows low mid mid and highs for each profile so it basically has done analysis on a ton of songs and based off of that it believes that a certain profile matches a genre so when you select that profile it does EQ changes as you can see when I'm going to go into the modules to match that profile so let's go and see what it's done so it's rolled off a lot on my bottom end so it's using a high shelf here to to boost it on I guess to make it brighter it's using a stabilizer the stabilizer is like the sculptor so the stabilizer is a adaptive EQ but you can control the low mid and high so you can say how much adaptive eqing you want it to do on each range so you can see here there go yeah so you can see it's making some changes you can set it to cut so if you just want it to cut certain frequencies to match that profile it can do that adaptive eqing here it's like adaptive compressing you could say it compresses or expands each band so you can select different frequency ranges and then if you roll it down I believe that compresses it if you push it up it expands it I think let me see expands above zero compresses below zero yeah then into an imager which changes the stereo width of the song so you can change the stereo width of different frequencies so here it's split it at 10K 2K and 120 HZ so it moned essentially mono the lowend which is good I would normally mono below 100 HZ but even 120 is okay it made the low mid wider and then it pulled a little bit off of the highs the maximizer again if you think about a limiter that you put at the end of uh your master chain so essentially you set a threshold where it starts to limit the lower set the threshold the louder the song is going to be but the more it's going to push into that limiter and really Crush any of your transients so the more you push it the flatter your output is going to be so you're not going to see any transients that's why if you're look at a lot of songs where people just drive the signal into the limiter it's almost like this flat block if you look at the audio wave there's no transient because everything is getting squashed so here's where you set your threshold there's the ceiling at minus one DB that's where you typically would want it and then it's doing some soft clipping let's compare it with the Met metric AB so again this is just using the [Music] profiles so this is my [Music] mix those adaptive eqs they're great when they're subtle they sound terrible when they're audible I can hear it pumping it's like you're hearing the highend even so you can get that with when you side chain a compressor to a kick in a base you can hear that pump I can even hear it on the high frequencies here it's it sounds [Music] terrible so I love I I do got to say this this is not a a knock to isotope I love their products I use ozone and neutron almost on every single track from an EQ perspective I find it convenient enough and their UI intuitive enough for me to use so I do use it I never used their assistant and you can see here why if you have zero knowledge of mixing and how to balance your track you can put it on maybe it'll give you a better sound than what you have but if you have any general awareness I think you can see the quality if you're just solely depending on the assistant uh so again this is not a knock to isotope I think they're fantastic fantastic products and I'm not sponsored by them I purchase them so this is not a bias review this is not a knock I just don't think from an AI perspective that we're anywhere near where we can hear fully finished polished song So if you think oh man the secret sauce is in AI it's going to help me make my song sound great I think we're still some ways from there let me know in the comments what do you think is sonal's mix better than mine is Isotopes mix better than mine I'm not going to be offended but let me know what you think now if you enjoy watching these kind of videos if this information has been helpful for you remember to like And subscribe to this channel remember to share it with somebody who could benefit from this I hope today's video has been informative and I hope that it inspired you to go and make some music peace

Channel: Adrian Camaroschi

Views: 4,302

Keywords: Mixing and mastering, Izotope, Sonible, Audio mixing, Audio mastering, Mastering a song, Smart:EQ 4, Smart:Limit, Smart:EQ, Smart:Comp, Smart:Comp 2, EQ, Adaptive EQ, Dynamic EQ, AI Mixing, AI Mixing and Mastering, Assistant Mixing, Ozone 10, Ozone 11, Neutron 4, FL Studio, FL Studio Mixing and Mastering, Frequency Unmasking, AI music algorithm, Music Production, Music producer, Audio engineering, Audio engineer

Id: 5-0g6j5lGt0

Length: 19min 36sec (1176 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 18 2024