WAVES Non Linear Summing

CIA everyone today we're going to talk about what non-linear summon can do to your mixes I left the link down in the description from where you can get access to this incredible plugin and take advantage of the Cyber Monday sales that waves are doing I've partnered up with waves to bring you to the table my expertise plus their incredible plugins and we're going to be deconstructing some of the mixes that I've done and understand how some of their extremely famous and popular plugins work in order to make your song become a hit [Music] before we start let's define a bit why do we use summing now with summing mixer we can actually bring out the full potential of our mixes and the secret recipe of this magic boxes stands within their non-linearity now one of the greatest thing about digital it's also one of its biggest flaws which is imprinting to sound linearity extremely transparent and often resulting sterile sound which is not exactly what we aim for when we mix music right we're trying to convey an emotion we're trying to thicken it up the sound and so in order for us to work in the box and still retaining the exact same advantages of when we were using analog console summoning mixer came into the equation now some a mixer can actually add warmth punch to your mixes letting pretty much any part of your mix to gain a specific thickness and depth now the beauty of this is that we could use nonlinear summing on separate tracks as well as to the overall track so we can work at a micro level and yet at a macro level in printing a big of this analog domain texture to the entire mix now summing mixer varies of course widely based on functionalities you know there are some simple mixers and yet some other summon mixer which add and love to combine different complexity to the signal whether it is total harmonic Distortion whether it's analog coloration and that's why we're doing this we're gonna go and deep dive into this amazing world of summing now NLS stands for non-linear summing now my friends at waves which we have recently partnered up have created one of the most sophisticated and truthfully non-linear summing mixer now so far we have been dealing with the problem of how can we gain that extra bit of texture when we mix in the digital domain so this video is for all of you the technically do not have access to a full equipped recording studio and yet are looking forward to add a bit of texture to the sound now as I said before NLS nonlinear summing delivers the richness and complexity that only analog gear was capable of doing so far now my friends at waves worked so meticulously to provide us not only with one of the greatest analog summing mixer that we have at our disposal within the digital world but they have sampled three legendary consoles the SSL 4000g the Emi 12345 Mark II and the Neve 5116 now along with each single Channel or input Channel they have also sampled the master bus so imagine this right now we have not only at our disposal each single input level Distortion so to speak of an SSL 4000g an Emi and a Neve but along with that we can combine it with their respective Master bus and the beauty of all of this is that we can mix match them what does it mean well it means that let's say some console let's say Neves work really great on percussions because they add that extra thumb that extra layer of thickness but perhaps we would like to mix vocals passing through um a console that adds a bit more mid-range to the signal in SSL now in the analog domain in a real recording studio you have access only to one flavor maybe two flavors at this point right now though we can choose pick and match whatever color palette works best for our sound so imagine this I could have within my entire mix a color palette that ranges between three different consoles three different Master bus and on top of this I can decide the amount of total harmonic saturation and coloration I want to imprint to the track incredible now before moving forward of course I would like to shed some light a bit on how this channel works an analogy can be made as let's say me and you today we go to buy a guitar the exact same guitar right yet my guitar will sound slightly different from yours based on the cut of the wood paint the way that the pickups have been assembled they're very similar but yet different this is exactly why well-known mixers and engineers so far are using consoles so the way you have to picture a console it's like a beautiful color palette right each single Channel although it belongs to the exact same console and although it's built in the exact same manner will feature different characteristic different characteristic which will imprint to the sound a specific texture I remember working on this beautiful ssl4000e back in the days and after sampling each single um fader I found out that Channel 6 of this SSL gave me the best tonal shape for my kick drum so instead of stemming out all my instruments starting from one being the kick run channel one being the kick drum moving forward Channel 6 has always been the ketron channel due to how the analog character works and so as I was saying before every time we're choosing a console or in this case a channel strip of a console there are five parameters that generally we should keep um in control the first one is the analog character of this channel then each single Channel provide a specific frequency response one of the most important and colorful aspect of those are the harmonic Distortion or THD total harmonic distortion clipping and Noise now so you might wondering okay what are all of this and how do they work let's talk about the analog character that each single Channel adds now Analog Devices generally produce an electrical artifacts that affect frequency response harmonics and cause signal to clip ever so slightly to introduce a bit of that warmth and noise now these artifacts is what we Define as the character now the character it's a of a particular device uh results have a combinations of factors which might vary based on if the the technology type is being used as a vacuum tube transistor so on and so forth so there are many variables that would allow us in phase of mixing to dictate exactly what is that we want to imprint in other words what type of shades of color do we want to print on our signal and this brings me to the second very important aspect of this um input level Distortion if we want to call it or non-linearity which is the frequency response now depending on the circuit as we're going to test it in a little bit whether if you're using an SSL or in this case an Emi or a Neve console depending on the circuits the input level frequency response varies this can result you know in specific frequency being boosted or being cut so the way you have to see this it's a sort of like free EQ section right we are not here just playing back the music we're tailoring the music based on our taste hence it's very important for us to understand how to mix match specific features of sound with specific feature of technology in this case choosing the right console upon which we would like to mix low-end content instrument high high mids so on and so forth so this is very important because the frequency response along with the analog characteristic are going to kind of like tailor a bit the sound smoothing it out or even making a bigger and wider the third and most important aspect in my opinion is the harmonics or THD total harmonic Distortion so THD generally it's a very low level based uh Distortion that adds odds or even harmonics to the input level and usually this is artifacts if we want to color artifacts which I think it's an extremely musical artifacts happens at a level much lower than the of the fundamental frequency and usually these artifacts happens at a level which is much lower or a bit lower than the fundamental frequency now the total harmonic Distortion is what really characterized and introduce a little bit of depth and warmth to our signal along with this we have the last two factors that are part of a channel strip which are clipping and noise now clipping is a high level distortion which in a way adds harmonics to the input level signal and that level though it's very close to the fundamental right so heat harmonics remains at the level close to its precedestras and so at this point clipping of course on a device such as a pre-amplifier which it's fed into a much and larger stronger signal to handle and the device in this case chops the waveform now of course we have to be very careful with this because we can produce two different effects one that is very pleasing and very musical in a way the other one you run into a problem of chopping off part of the signal and pretty much destroying the waveform of a sound lastly we got the noise now noise occurs and Analog Devices uh due to the interaction between a power supply and a device electrical magnetic uh shielding properties now in this case this results in a very completely random low level signal now the noise level defines actually the dynamic depth of usable signal which is something that we generally Define and called noise to Signal ratio okay so after this introduction I'm going to show you how I integrate waves analysts into my mixing template and show you the benefits of it now the song that I'm about to play you it's called forbidden uh the song was written and produced by an artist called Karen I will highly encourage you to go and listen to him I'm gonna give you a little sneak peek of the actual mix and then we're going to dive in in how I used waves analysts it's hard to remember what it feels whatsoever heart cause I'm just a young boy and I'm chained to my guitar [Music] life for beating do you like that feeling yeah she's alive [Music] beautiful song very complex it adds a lot of real drums percussion synthesizer so there is a lot going on within this song the way I use it NLS or the way NLS could actually be used are two ways now you can generally use it as a virtual summing console which is exactly how I'm using it in this specific context so as you can see each one of my tracks has been routed to a sub mix so all my kicks are going to a kicked Ox snares to a snare arcs uh the rest of the drums minus the Tom Stewart drum stocks Toms Bass guitar keys and so forth now these are my buses so I generally split kick snare Toms and the rest of the drums including overheads hats and rooms I have an ox for my base my keys and my guitar and of course after my print track an ox for my vocals now everything is being controlled via VCA so for the time being I'm gonna just mute for a minute foreign and so as I was telling you before NLS could be used as I'm using it in this case as a virtual summing Box console so I have pretty much split it different group of tracks and instead of having all of them coming out from the exact same output what I'm doing is outputting each single track to their own input level and modifying it a bit so in this case NLS is insert as the last insert on my track never mind that over here I added a bit of limiting just focus on here so the correct procedure should have been adding it after the L2 but again we'll learn the rules to break them right so in this case uh the direct out is routed through an analog console now as you can see over here I have on my drums an instance of the Neve Channel on my base I have an Emi which I love the harmonic Distortion that I keep adding through the drive knob here on my keys I have another new channel and on my guitars and other Neve lastly on my vocals I have an SSL Channel now in this case the NLS it's placed as the last plugin on top of my different stems and now the channel here are feeding the NLS bus which is the first channel on my mix bus now what does it do now right now the anus the NLS mix bus displays as the first insert on my master track and in this case it acts as a stereo return now the great thing about this is that as you can see here I can change based on a VCA assignment over here one two three etc etc the amount of total Distortion via this mix bus mixer and it's like I'm having two different levels of connection so I have a direct Micro level input on each single track and then over here I have my master bus which in this case allow me to a vary the level of different tracks assigned to a specific VCA I can add or reduce the drive and I can even trim the overall group if I want nevertheless I could add noise and I can bypass it the other way to work with NLS instead would be to instantiate analysts as the first insert on a track now there's not a right or wrong it's just understanding how we can tailor things upon our needs now if I would have placed NLS as in many cases I do especially with synthesizer base and low end um harmonic content instrument in this case if I do this is to simulate a console preamp coloration now in this case the NLS it's placed on the first insert of Pro Tools my doll on an audio track and in this case it can be inserted at any point so I could place a couple plugins before and then insert the NLS right after now in this case this allows us to pretty much use a bit more of the input saturation or drive of the signal and change it the the kind of saturation between microphone or line level input nevertheless we can always trim the overall input of the tracks but now enough of me talking let's go ahead and listen how this incredible plug-in works so right now what I did was soloing pretty much drums bass guitars Keys okay I'm gonna give you a little sneak peek of it [Music] foreign [Music] so as you can see in here especially every time the analysis bypass is not Reinventing the wheel but yet it's adding an extra layer of thickness to the overall sound which otherwise would be missing the sound would be a bit too thin a bit too transparent and we can notice this especially if we go ahead and solo only the guitar the drums and bass [Music] we're using four instances so we doubt let me move them a little bit out of the way on so as you can hear right now we are kind of like losing the bottom end as we were saying before the total harmonic Distortion which gets introduced via this little Drive knob happens a bit lower than the fundamental and in this case we're losing all that thump from the kick drum uh that smoothed out of the top end of the the symbols that which in this case sounds very harsh and we're kind of like confining the drums in a very bi-dimensional kind of aspect whereas what we want here is increase the depth right so how do we do this well I've specifically chosen an uh a Neve console due to the fact of what the Neve circuitry does specifically on drums and in low frequency content once again um let's hear actually in context only the kickens near with out on you hear the bite so we're adding a bit of top hand from the kick drum but yet a lot of low end from the bottom of it and the snare drum is kind of like coming to life all of a sudden we hear the snap we hear the body which before although we have mixed it in a precise and specific way doesn't has it out on it's just night and day and so this is generally the process that I have on my template for my drums I always have an instance of vanilla NLS now something that I want you to notice is what really makes this plugin unique now the great advantage of having analog emulation is that they are emulations right they have figured out the right way of creating an algorithm that emulates the way that analog circuitry works now this is true for a lot of plugins but it's also a problem because right now they have only model in a lot of plug-in manufacturers one single circuitry so if you start stocking the exact same plugin times 100 tracks you're always gonna end it up with the exact same amount of total harmonic distortion here if you noticed each single track although I'm using the exact same Plugin or the exact same console has a different number now waves have sampled per each single console 32 discrete different channels so the amount of leverage that you have to mix signals it's humongous you can do literally whatever you want the mix match and change the total harmonic Distortion so this is what makes this plug-in unique in the way eating produce some sort of like non-linearities between even in this case three instances or four instances of the exact same plugin let's hear what this plugin does and of course I want to show you also my master bus on base and keys [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] we have this extremely beautiful low end which is the foundation of the song Right which is very base incentive driven which is kind of like locking up that bottom end that explosion of the lowest harmonic and so right now if we want as I did over here I cranked a bit more the microphone the drive level of my base to really bring this up [Music] the thump and the mid-range of this incredible Emi Channel [Music] [Music] you hear how much thump we get now it's like redesigning and reshaping the base which probably has been uh recorded via the eye so it's great but somehow is lacking that extra lower harmonic and thickness which likely for us we can add and I've sampled the bass via different modules actually if you want I can remove the vca5 and right now I can let you hear the different modules on base only so let's get on our base here so let's start with the Emi [Music] myself foreign [Music] [Music] adds a bit more low end so a bit more thump at the bottom end but it doesn't give me a great details of definition in the in the mid range the SSL on the other hand is very open very broad that's why I tend to use it primarily on guitars but the emis especially with the drive set at three o'clock does Something Magic to the low end because that's an and only thicken it up the low end and the the fundamentals of the bass but it works through the whole structure of its harmonics making also the notes being more clear and heard which is something that it's very hard to get out of a bass guitar now let's see if I add a bit of My Level to storage [Music] hell the base start acquiring a bit more drive but imagine using this in parallel you can obtain an incredible scene sound and much more grit if you may lastly the noise [Music] I don't know if you were capable of catching it but it adds just a little extra your candy to make the actual base pick and Define it a bit more now I didn't use it in this specific mix just because I needed a bit more definition if this was a bit more of a rock and roll mix I would have used as I do many times the noise for sure so once again I'm going to give you a before and after our NLS on our tracks [Music] now what I'm going to do instead of bypassing all my plugins here I'm actually going to bypass the master section here so focus on how this mix of getting extremely wide all of a sudden start shredding it down the depth get lost every time I bypass the plug-in and the bottom end it's kind of like gun it's very unfocus so we're going to do it first with and then I will bypass it foreign [Music] so as you were able to hear it makes a humongous humongous difference because right now we're adding that non-linearity from one channel to another adding different flavors of actual mix bus processing and so for now we are gaining all that three-dimensional sound that a lot of Engineers are after especially when working in analog consoles now if you are interested in this plugin waves is now running it's massive sales via Black Friday so in the link down below you're going to get a chance to actually get your hands and try or even buy via the Black Friday sales this incredible plugin until next time ciao all right now that you see how I use waves analyst I'm curious to see how you're going to implement this incredible plugin in your workflow don't forget to hit the link down in the description from where you can get your own version of the Waves NLS and please don't forget to subscribe until next time ciao [Music] thank you

Channel: Music Technology Tips and Tricks

Views: 6,621

Keywords: Matteo Marciano, Audio Engineering, Mixing, Mastering, Pro Tools, Avid, Post Production Audio, Mixing Audio, Music Production, Sound Design, Sound Recording, Microphones Techniques

Id: y4NTev678_4

Length: 31min 45sec (1905 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 03 2022