Recording - Demo - 6

Note to faithful writers: When sending email to talkback@recordingmag.com, please remember to include your name and where you hail from. Questions about aux busses Hi David Alexander: I’m Ron from Europe. I read your GREAT article in Recording, “Mixing Vocals - More Of The Basics” (October 2008). This is the article I was waiting for a long time! I re-constructed your settings in Logic Pro 8 and in Figure 1 of your article you also have a AUX called “Stereo/Aux” but you have nothing written about that. Can you tell me what this AUX named “Stereo/Aux” is good for? When I have a fader for every plug-in (aux) like the reverb Is it right to control the reverb amount for (say) the verse vocal channel with the bus knob since there’s also a fader at the aux if I want less reverb there? If I understand it right this way I can, for example, use less reverb for the verse lead vocal and more reverb, turned up on the bus, for e.g. the chorus lead vocal? Is it this way how you usually work? I hope to hear from you since I redo my autoload song. Thanks a lot in advance, Ron via email David Alexander replies: Hi Ron, I’m glad you enjoyed the article and are putting it to good use! To first answer your question about that “Stereo/Aux” send: it wasn’t used in that example, at least in my case. I didn’t have anything assigned to that Aux, but since it’s there, you can try a bit of distortion on that Aux. Sometimes a bit of distortion blended in with the clean dry vocal on an Aux can add a lot of presence or even a distinct character to the vocal. You can also eq the distortion in the Aux channel to shape what part of the vocal gets the distortion, mid freq, hi freq, etc.. Experiment with different distortions and you’ll see what I’m talking about sometimes just a touch blended with the lead is great. To answer your second question about fader vs. bus control: I think it’s better to send the reverb a nice strong signal from the bus send on the vocal channel and control the reverb volume from the aux channel strip. You can then automate the level of the aux reverb fader to control how much wet signal gets mixed in with the vocal—you could even set up two reverbs as auxes with different settings and then mute and solo each one as needed for different parts of the song. Each reverb could even have its own eq to make things interesting. I hope these ideas spark your imagination and creativity with aux effects. Thanks for reaching out and I wish you much enjoyment and success!—DA 6 Commentary from Aphex Systems The following letter refers to Bob Emmet’s article “Master Bus Processing” from the December 2008 issue of Recording. In the December 2008 issue, Bob Emmet makes a sweeping comment: “Exciters/enhancers do way too much audio damage, generating harsh artifacts and sibilance. Save these for the few individual tracks where they’re needed”. While I appreciate his sentiment, obviously drawn from using Aural Exciter/Big Bottom wannabe’s, he lumps our products together with these other products. If someone unknowledgeable were to follow his advice, they would be miss the opportunity to use a tool that could be of tremendous benefit to them. The other products are gated equalizers and/or phase shifters. One in particular adds a 12 dB high frequency shelving boost when input amplitude goes over threshold. That would certainly cause harsh artifacts and sibilance. The Aural Exciter, however, generates harmonics on the transients in the input and adds them to the input slightly time delayed so there is little increase in amplitude. This adds clarity, detail and greater openness to the signal. It also has been clinically proven to increase intelligibility. The Aural Exciter has been used on masters for over 30 years with excellent results. It is used on some of the top radio stations around the world. It is a standard in the DJ worl d as well as many fixed installations. So it continues to be successfully used across a stereo mix by thousands of people every day. I totally agree with Bob in that it is better to apply effects selectively during the mix. But if the mix is already done, it is sometimes hard to go back and remix. One of the marvelous attributes of the Aural Exciter when used across a master is that individual elements become more distinct relative to one and other. So a dense, dark mix gets more energy and life. The Big Bottom is also quite useful across a master. When used properly it restores some of the bass energy and resonance that heavy dynamics processing can take away. Other bass ‘enhancers’ add sub-harmonics or simple eq boost. The problem with those approaches is that they dramatically increase peak amplitude while the Big Bottom adds little or no peaks when the input is high. I would be happy to loan Bob a Model 204 Aural Exciter/Big Bottom for him to test for himself. If he still feels that our product should be grouped with all the others, then he will have had the direct experience to make that evaluation. Best regards, Marvin Caesar, President Aphex Systems, Ltd. Sun Valley, CA www.aphex.com RECORDING FEBRUARY 2009

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Recording - Demo

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