Virtual instruments for sale by Bluetechaudio
3 min readBest audio plugins for sale? You’ll be surprised what you can do with basic ingredients. Start out with something simple – a small sine-wave snippet, kick or snare drum – and simply loop, process and affect it with the tools in your DAW, one by one. Not only will you discover more about the tools at your disposal, you’ll probably use effects you’ve never explored before and you’ll start to realise how limitless your sound-design options really are. It’s a scattergun approach, but you’ll learn more about your effects and processors by applying them to something simple. And now we’re going to turn that advice on its head…
Given that extremely high and low frequencies stand out more when we listen to loud sound effects, we can create the impression of loudness at lower listening levels by attenuating the mid-range and/or boosting the high/low ends of the spectrum. On a graphic EQ, it would look like a smiley face, which is why producers talk about ‘scooping the mid-range’ to add weight and power to a mix. This trick can be applied in any number of ways, from treating the whole mix to some (careful) broad EQ at mixdown/mastering to applying a ‘scoop’ to just one or two broadband instruments or mix stems (i.e. the drums and guitars submix). As you gain experience and get your head around this principle (you might even already be doing it naturally), you can build your track arrangements and choices of instrumentation with an overall frequency dynamic – right from the beginning.
You’ll also probably want to tweak the levels of each side (relative to each other) to maintain the right balance in the mix and the desired general left-right balance within the stereo spectrum. You can apply additional effects to one/both sides, like applying subtle LFO-controlled modulation or filter effects to the delayed side. A word of caution: Don’t overdo it. In a full mix, use the Haas Effect on one or two instruments, maximum. This helps you avoid unfocusing the stereo spread and being left with phasey mush. There are limits to how well our ears can differentiate between sounds that occupy similar frequencies of human hearing. Masking occurs when two or more sounds sit in the exact same frequencies. Generally, the louder of the two will either partially or completely obscure the other, which then seems to ‘disappear’ from the mix. See more info at audio plugins.
The Haas Effect was first described by the acoustician Helmut Haas in 1941. This trick behind this technique can make a mono sound into the illusion of a fantastic stereo sound. It is easy to master. All you have to do is pick two identical mono sounds. Then, take one and pan it hard left and the other one hard right. Delay one sound a few milliseconds later than the other. This technique tricks the brain into thinking you are hearing one winded sound. Experiment with the delay time to vary the intensity of the effect . Be aware the shorter you delay the time being used, the more you will be prone to be producing an unwanted comb filtering. Since you are using two separate sounds, try adding different effects to each one. For instance, use LFO modulation on one sound and add a filter effects to the other. However, don’t abuse the Haas Effect technique. Over using this technique in a single song can sometimes ruin your stereo field image.
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