If you ever get to LA go to the Capitol Records building and tour the place look at the reverb chambers in the basement. Cool piece of history and it makes you appreciate the effort to make recordings back in the day. Hopefully they still do tours.
there are two types of reverb, those that work for your song and those that don't :)) jokes aside great video brotha! p.s. Soundcloud apologised for their ai making a mistake and they've given me back my song ^^
One note about what you said about small clubs. I used to work as the audio engineer for a pretty popular underground club that was maybe twice as large as what you showed on the picture. In general, there are two kinds of sounds you should be going for for such clubs. It has to do with whether the club is full of people, or not. When it's not, there's going to be a bunch of reflections. Conversely, when it's full of people, the average listener will be hearing the sound *through the body of another person* and reflections will be massively damped as well. So go very very low on reverb with tracks you play early on in your set, but once everyone's there and it's just jam packed, you can whip out tracks that are very large on reverb. But even then have mercy on people and at least use a high-shelf to turn the highs down. So don't low pass the highs at 3 kHz already cutting them off fully, but maybe just attenuate them a bunch... how much is a judgment call. I'd say probably by at least 6-12 dB. And then add a lowpass at 8 kHz because a bunch of people will be standing right in front of the tweeter and it'll probably be downright painful for them and you don't want that bad experience for them. Once the club is packed you can also go big on bass, even what you'd call "busy bass". Once the club is absolutely full, you can play something like Tunnel by Richie Hawtin and it'll sound huge, but it won't sound busy. While the club's empty, it'll just kinda sound weak and annoying. It all has to do with all the gelatin standing around damping it all. If you want a club to always sound like that, you've got a job cut out for you with raised floors, fireproof denim cuts, and fake walls taking up otherwise good dancing space you could be getting paid for by patrons. Bear in mind that most clubs don't have a house equalizer, let alone a proper DSP box. The sound system sounded horrendous when I got it... I had to go down to -60 dB on some cuts to make it sound pleasant. One time I've had Jeff Mills play the system after I've set it up. He was going to play a couple hour set starting around midnight. He loved it so much that he asked the owner to take the time from djs that would have followed him, he moved up his flight, and stayed playing until noon.
@@Bthelick if it were only that easy. the mid-highs were absolute garbage ass horns that one of the club managers probably took a bribe to buy. absolute jerk. that's where the -60 came in. iirc those were stereo, but it's not like you could necessarily also hear it. there was a couple groups of dissimilar bass speakers, one was better but took more volume, set up at the front free standing next to the booth and one was mid room, on the left side, firing to the right, that was a crappier system with more distortion and less extension but it still did enough of a good job to fill the space and ensure its survival. that one was built into the wall. i believe those were mono, but it's not like it was really good mono. but i remember they didn't have a lot of destructive interference.
btw, a really good set of mid-highs can make the reverb much more pleasant and bearable. at that point not having those highs really ends up making your song sound dull. something like funktion one's can make that stuff sound really good even in an absolutely tiny space. funktion one really make a huge difference compared to the run of the mill you get at clubs that still run 20-30 year old rigs. as a dj if you're going to play on one of those be prepared to have material that sounds more modern, or you'll sound dull.
@@Bthelick mono, unipolar bass is super important. one time i went to this little ass psytrance rave in the mountains in switzerland and the main floor had bass speakers on both sides. when you walked around the uh "dance floor" you could literally hear the bass come in and out every other step you made. i convinced them to move the speakers together. they told me i saved the rave lol it was so much better
Appreciate how pragmatic and useful in the real world your videos are! And also that you don't feel the need to have video of your face in a small window in the video, nodding along and looking profoundly earnest. 😀 BTW Fascinating thing about reverb is that our brain automatically filters it out of our environment in real time. Simple test is to record yourself in conversation with someone in a room, just on your phone. Then play it back later and you can hear the room reverb on the recording that you didn't hear at the time. And even stranger that your brain is filtering out the reverb of the current room you are playing back the reverbed recording in.
You have some really good videos. I've watched several recently! I disagree in a bit on timing reverbs. You may not be able to hear, but you can feel. Similar to mixing in a delay until you can just hear it, then lowering it a couple db so you can "feel" it rather than hear it. Whatever gets you to the best sound the quickest is what works though :)
Thanks. Well regarding the reverb that was my point, you have to feel it because the given number (the T60 time) can absolutely not be heard. You have to adjust manually and go by feel, the number is useless outside of measuring real acoustic spaces in silence.
I will certainly try in the future. I haven't done enough research yet that was just my first quick attempt . Let me know if you have any favorite artists or tracks I can reference 🙏
one of my favorite fakeverbs is mutant reverb (it's essentially a dub reverb and it sounds very nice). there's a trick with it where you can turn the decay all the way up and then decrease the room size to get a nice little riser. i also like messing wiht the scratch function, adds some really nice little pops/clicks/pitch blips into the sound, good for synths and stuff that you want to sound more ambient. you will need to put an eq on it to roll off the low end, as it likes to put out DC offset :)
I explain this in my free racks video. I don't mix like most because I take advantage of Ableton's track swaps. So I always use inserts and have developed inserts that behave as sends to compensate. (Makes much more sense in the vid) I only used sends here for the demonstration. I've not done that in many many years on an actual track.
Yeah I remember, great engineer. Back then it was a fantastic way of melding an acoustic disco band with the electronics. He was a great arranger, long before mix engineers realized they could be one!
@@Bthelick I totally agree, I like to watch his interviews when I'm having a bit of creative blockage. It can spark an idea and getting me thinking how to approach my next piece.
u have to be a dj. go do it bud. get some upset expiriense like "oh crap, no one dancing". it is a pain but it makes us to grow. and on the other side "hell yeah" expiriense like "volume up! up! - its clipping! -fuck the clipping! turn it! XD "
Thanks for the great explanation! May i ask a nerdy question to a different theme? :) In the TB Barricade Limiter is an option for dithering for 16bit or 24bit. When using this dithering, after the Limiter, the audio data are still 32 bit in the DAW and then, when the DAW seves teh PCM file, it downsamples the data to 16 or 24 bit. So the quantisation errors occur after the dithering. Is this a good processing, or should the dithering be done after the downsampling step? So would it be better to use the dithering function of the DAW in the bouncing process and not the dithering of the Limiter? Cheers!
Functionally, either approach should achieve the same thing. Ignoring for a moment the quality difference between the noise types, the job of the dither is to add enough signal (noise) to toggle the least significant bit (LSB) of the chosen bit depth , so that when the file is truncated to a lower bit depth it does not introduce quantization errors at the noise floor. (Btw don't confuse bit reduction with down sampling. Those are two different things) If you add 3rd party dither noise as the last process before export, as long as the fader is at zero when you choose the lower bit depth to export the daw should simply truncate the file to the chosen bit depth, there is no conversion happening in truth. It's just cut off. Like how clipping stops at zero, 16bit 'clips' at the other end at the -65, 536's step. (I only say fader at zero because I suddenly realized I've never tested if ableton's master channel uses post fader processing) If the dither noise is doing its job, there should be no functional difference. But you say you have measured a quantization error? or were you asking hypothetically? Even before it leaves the 32-bit environment with 16-bit dither on a bit depth meter should show the output is 16 bit at that point already. So if you are finding errors I would presume the processor is faulty. Now, IF you actually meant you were "down sampling" meaning to convert from a higher sample rate, and you weren't just confused between bit depth reduction and sample rate reduction, then that changes my advice. The down sampling needs to happen before the dither. if you're in the realm of minute differences like choosing dither noise, and that actually makes a difference to you, then you want to be looking into dedicated sample rate converter programs as well because many daws don't have great internal downsampling. I.e you will down sample the 32-bit float file in something like R8brain and then export the lower sample rate one through your preferred dither last for the bit reduction. Having said all that, personally I've always just used pow-r 3 shaped noise, Which fortunately ableton has built-in. All of my mastering engineer heroes used that and I've not changed since. I'm large making low dynamic electronic music, dither differences were much more of consideration back in the days of cd and trying to squeeze high dynamic range audiophile music onto CD.
@@Bthelick Big Thanks for your very helpfull answer! My question was hypothetical, cause i was not sure if i chould use the dithering from the limiter. And yes, i confused downsampling and bit reduction. Now i understand :)
Question in terms of mixing which is more "real" the sound coming from close range studio monitors or flat response head phones. Bass drum sounding good tru monitors. But don't have the same punch in the headphones if I double the kick then it punches thru the headphones. But it didn't seem necessary on the monitors especially at volume. Just some thoughts on what we are really hearing. I tend to work thru my monitors more than my headphones. Any hints of wisdom?
hmmmmm, depends on a lot of factors. Monitors are entirely dependant on the room, I've heard £3000 worth of monitors sound the same as £400 ones in a bad room! hard to say how 'accurate' your room is without hearing it. The major downside to Headphones is they are binaural , not stereo, so that affects depth perception and stereo decisions. I swap between both all the time to reset my ears and get a fresh perspective. Either way to check your kick level you need to be referencing against a few tracks in a similar key. When you say "double the kick" do you mean turn it up by 6db? Because that would indicate quite the difference between your setups. And can you identify which part of the kick is 'punching' through better? does it take all that extra level just to be able to hear the sub? or is it the 'chest thud' that cuts through when doubled? Are you sure the part of the kick on the monitors is the same part on the headphones? Try listening to a small frequency range of the track with a plugin like ISOL8 . start with below 80hz, then try 80 - 200. what does that reveal on each system, and against the references? 'flat' headphones can sound pretty light if you've been listening to a bass heavy system. It might be worth testing to check if your seating position is in a bass pocket. i.e. does the bottom resonate or die when your head is in different locations in the room?
@@Bthelick thanks you've given me something to work with. I know you can't hear my room. It a small room lots of wood furniture in it. Yeah the headphones are what I'm really not sure of. They just sound light as you say compared to my monitors. I'm just trying not figure out what others are actually going to hear. I started using references and it really helped my kick drum choices. And that was my issue I'm like sounds great on my monitors but weak in my headphones. You've helped a lot totally cut down on sound processing because of your advice. Mixs do sound better. Just trying to get this stuff release ready
You can't mix low frequencies on either of those monitoring options. Nearfields don't have enough bass so what you're hearing is probably only the 3rd or 4th harmonic and up of your low frequency content. Headphones do a trick on you because they're very in your face. Need to listen on a larger system to be able to do things properly I'm afraid. Make friends with someone and go to listen there. That's your best bet. And make sure your bass is in key.
Whoops. Sorry about the "floater" text. No idea how that crept in there 😂
What about the "leaving" text? Not sorry about that at all? I see how it is.
@@jeffsymons7084 😅
I'm having a beer, enjoying how this guy makes things easier to understand
Congratulations!
Bthelick, I am converting a van into a camper, long and sometimes lonely days but your vids and livestreams have kept me in great company! Thank you!
My pleasure!
I'm sure that sense of freedom will be worth it! Best of luck 🤞👊
I just finished my double decker bus just before Christmas, I know what are going through buddy, but it will be worth every minute.
Long wheel base sound better.
Oh man that’s a sexy groove. Definitely need more tutorials on this genre and no fisher like music😂
Never really thought much about ER and it's influence on the busyness of a track. Fantastic insight as always. ❤
If you ever get to LA go to the Capitol Records building and tour the place look at the reverb chambers in the basement. Cool piece of history and it makes you appreciate the effort to make recordings back in the day. Hopefully they still do tours.
I have worked briefly in LA but didn't get to see that. I hope they're still there
there are two types of reverb, those that work for your song and those that don't :)) jokes aside great video brotha! p.s. Soundcloud apologised for their ai making a mistake and they've given me back my song ^^
Ah great news. 👊
One note about what you said about small clubs. I used to work as the audio engineer for a pretty popular underground club that was maybe twice as large as what you showed on the picture. In general, there are two kinds of sounds you should be going for for such clubs. It has to do with whether the club is full of people, or not. When it's not, there's going to be a bunch of reflections. Conversely, when it's full of people, the average listener will be hearing the sound *through the body of another person* and reflections will be massively damped as well. So go very very low on reverb with tracks you play early on in your set, but once everyone's there and it's just jam packed, you can whip out tracks that are very large on reverb. But even then have mercy on people and at least use a high-shelf to turn the highs down. So don't low pass the highs at 3 kHz already cutting them off fully, but maybe just attenuate them a bunch... how much is a judgment call. I'd say probably by at least 6-12 dB. And then add a lowpass at 8 kHz because a bunch of people will be standing right in front of the tweeter and it'll probably be downright painful for them and you don't want that bad experience for them.
Once the club is packed you can also go big on bass, even what you'd call "busy bass". Once the club is absolutely full, you can play something like Tunnel by Richie Hawtin and it'll sound huge, but it won't sound busy. While the club's empty, it'll just kinda sound weak and annoying. It all has to do with all the gelatin standing around damping it all. If you want a club to always sound like that, you've got a job cut out for you with raised floors, fireproof denim cuts, and fake walls taking up otherwise good dancing space you could be getting paid for by patrons.
Bear in mind that most clubs don't have a house equalizer, let alone a proper DSP box. The sound system sounded horrendous when I got it... I had to go down to -60 dB on some cuts to make it sound pleasant. One time I've had Jeff Mills play the system after I've set it up. He was going to play a couple hour set starting around midnight. He loved it so much that he asked the owner to take the time from djs that would have followed him, he moved up his flight, and stayed playing until noon.
This is great insight Thanks. -60 is crazy!
While I've got you I have ask was the system mono or stereo?
@@Bthelick if it were only that easy. the mid-highs were absolute garbage ass horns that one of the club managers probably took a bribe to buy. absolute jerk. that's where the -60 came in. iirc those were stereo, but it's not like you could necessarily also hear it. there was a couple groups of dissimilar bass speakers, one was better but took more volume, set up at the front free standing next to the booth and one was mid room, on the left side, firing to the right, that was a crappier system with more distortion and less extension but it still did enough of a good job to fill the space and ensure its survival. that one was built into the wall. i believe those were mono, but it's not like it was really good mono. but i remember they didn't have a lot of destructive interference.
the highs (horns) were those trumpet looking shits from void... never buy fucking void
btw, a really good set of mid-highs can make the reverb much more pleasant and bearable. at that point not having those highs really ends up making your song sound dull. something like funktion one's can make that stuff sound really good even in an absolutely tiny space. funktion one really make a huge difference compared to the run of the mill you get at clubs that still run 20-30 year old rigs. as a dj if you're going to play on one of those be prepared to have material that sounds more modern, or you'll sound dull.
@@Bthelick mono, unipolar bass is super important. one time i went to this little ass psytrance rave in the mountains in switzerland and the main floor had bass speakers on both sides. when you walked around the uh "dance floor" you could literally hear the bass come in and out every other step you made. i convinced them to move the speakers together. they told me i saved the rave lol it was so much better
Once again... Very useful. Thank you..
Just wanted to sleep but lets watch this first
Was about to go to sleep but B posted and I just can’t leave it till tomorrow 🙌
Aww cheers 👊
Love Ro minimal , thanks for doing this !!!
Appreciate how pragmatic and useful in the real world your videos are! And also that you don't feel the need to have video of your face in a small window in the video, nodding along and looking profoundly earnest. 😀
BTW Fascinating thing about reverb is that our brain automatically filters it out of our environment in real time. Simple test is to record yourself in conversation with someone in a room, just on your phone. Then play it back later and you can hear the room reverb on the recording that you didn't hear at the time. And even stranger that your brain is filtering out the reverb of the current room you are playing back the reverbed recording in.
Yes correct, I had a take mentioning that thanks 👊
Such an informative video. Your videos are very unique. Many thanks B. Love from Canada.
Ah, finally! Been waiting for this all week🤣
Such a good groove 💃
There are 3 types of non-natural reverbs. Spring verb, plate verb, and algorithmic.
lovely video. a very practical approach to doing things.
You have some really good videos. I've watched several recently! I disagree in a bit on timing reverbs. You may not be able to hear, but you can feel. Similar to mixing in a delay until you can just hear it, then lowering it a couple db so you can "feel" it rather than hear it. Whatever gets you to the best sound the quickest is what works though :)
Thanks.
Well regarding the reverb that was my point, you have to feel it because the given number (the T60 time) can absolutely not be heard. You have to adjust manually and go by feel, the number is useless outside of measuring real acoustic spaces in silence.
Brilliant - as always !!!
Great video, appreciated it. Maybe next time you could share some rominimal tips and explanations. Thank you!
I will certainly try in the future.
I haven't done enough research yet that was just my first quick attempt . Let me know if you have any favorite artists or tracks I can reference 🙏
@@Bthelick Mihai Popoviciu as an option
one of my favorite fakeverbs is mutant reverb (it's essentially a dub reverb and it sounds very nice). there's a trick with it where you can turn the decay all the way up and then decrease the room size to get a nice little riser. i also like messing wiht the scratch function, adds some really nice little pops/clicks/pitch blips into the sound, good for synths and stuff that you want to sound more ambient.
you will need to put an eq on it to roll off the low end, as it likes to put out DC offset :)
Love your videos man! 👊
thanks a lot... love this track btw
Mister, would you please shoot us a video on how you'd approach a minimal house / romininal track? Just curious about your take on making the genre.
Definitely , as soon as I get my head around it 🤣
Very nice. Agree. The beat divisions just don’t work.
Any thoughts on when to use reverb as a send and when to use on the track chain?
I explain this in my free racks video.
I don't mix like most because I take advantage of Ableton's track swaps. So I always use inserts and have developed inserts that behave as sends to compensate. (Makes much more sense in the vid)
I only used sends here for the demonstration. I've not done that in many many years on an actual track.
Pretty sure you're the same guy from the U-he videos. Awesome.
Never heard him , I'll have to check now 🤔
I don't even know if I'm saying u-he correctly 🤣
Bruce Swedien would play the recorded synth parts through a PA in a large room and record it and mix it back into the track.
Yeah I remember, great engineer.
Back then it was a fantastic way of melding an acoustic disco band with the electronics.
He was a great arranger, long before mix engineers realized they could be one!
@@Bthelick I totally agree, I like to watch his interviews when I'm having a bit of creative blockage. It can spark an idea and getting me thinking how to approach my next piece.
nine inch nails did that on some of their later records too.
UA-cam: set your parameters to this & that
Bthelick: set your parameters emotionally 💖
u have to be a dj. go do it bud. get some upset expiriense like "oh crap, no one dancing". it is a pain but it makes us to grow. and on the other side "hell yeah" expiriense like "volume up! up! - its clipping! -fuck the clipping! turn it! XD "
Would you consider Fab-Filter Pro R a fake or real reverb plugin? 🤔
Rake! It's both.(v2)
The default modern setting sounds real to me. V2 Is good at fake in its vintage/plate modes.
Thanks for the great explanation!
May i ask a nerdy question to a different theme? :) In the TB Barricade Limiter is an option for dithering for 16bit or 24bit. When using this dithering, after the Limiter, the audio data are still 32 bit in the DAW and then, when the DAW seves teh PCM file, it downsamples the data to 16 or 24 bit. So the quantisation errors occur after the dithering. Is this a good processing, or should the dithering be done after the downsampling step?
So would it be better to use the dithering function of the DAW in the bouncing process and not the dithering of the Limiter? Cheers!
Functionally, either approach should achieve the same thing.
Ignoring for a moment the quality difference between the noise types, the job of the dither is to add enough signal (noise) to toggle the least significant bit (LSB) of the chosen bit depth , so that when the file is truncated to a lower bit depth it does not introduce quantization errors at the noise floor.
(Btw don't confuse bit reduction with down sampling. Those are two different things)
If you add 3rd party dither noise as the last process before export, as long as the fader is at zero when you choose the lower bit depth to export the daw should simply truncate the file to the chosen bit depth, there is no conversion happening in truth. It's just cut off. Like how clipping stops at zero, 16bit 'clips' at the other end at the -65, 536's step.
(I only say fader at zero because I suddenly realized I've never tested if ableton's master channel uses post fader processing)
If the dither noise is doing its job, there should be no functional difference.
But you say you have measured a quantization error? or were you asking hypothetically?
Even before it leaves the 32-bit environment with 16-bit dither on a bit depth meter should show the output is 16 bit at that point already. So if you are finding errors I would presume the processor is faulty.
Now, IF you actually meant you were "down sampling" meaning to convert from a higher sample rate, and you weren't just confused between bit depth reduction and sample rate reduction, then that changes my advice. The down sampling needs to happen before the dither.
if you're in the realm of minute differences like choosing dither noise, and that actually makes a difference to you, then you want to be looking into dedicated sample rate converter programs as well because many daws don't have great internal downsampling.
I.e you will down sample the 32-bit float file in something like R8brain and then export the lower sample rate one through your preferred dither last for the bit reduction.
Having said all that, personally I've always just used pow-r 3 shaped noise, Which fortunately ableton has built-in. All of my mastering engineer heroes used that and I've not changed since. I'm large making low dynamic electronic music, dither differences were much more of consideration back in the days of cd and trying to squeeze high dynamic range audiophile music onto CD.
@@Bthelick Big Thanks for your very helpfull answer!
My question was hypothetical, cause i was not sure if i chould use the dithering from the limiter. And yes, i confused downsampling and bit reduction. Now i understand :)
What about ableton Reverb or echo ? Not worth it for you ?
Yes it's fine. I made a rack of the Ableton reverb and gave it away. that's in my "speed up your workflow" video.
Question in terms of mixing which is more "real" the sound coming from close range studio monitors or flat response head phones. Bass drum sounding good tru monitors. But don't have the same punch in the headphones if I double the kick then it punches thru the headphones. But it didn't seem necessary on the monitors especially at volume. Just some thoughts on what we are really hearing. I tend to work thru my monitors more than my headphones. Any hints of wisdom?
hmmmmm, depends on a lot of factors.
Monitors are entirely dependant on the room, I've heard £3000 worth of monitors sound the same as £400 ones in a bad room! hard to say how 'accurate' your room is without hearing it.
The major downside to Headphones is they are binaural , not stereo, so that affects depth perception and stereo decisions.
I swap between both all the time to reset my ears and get a fresh perspective.
Either way to check your kick level you need to be referencing against a few tracks in a similar key.
When you say "double the kick" do you mean turn it up by 6db? Because that would indicate quite the difference between your setups.
And can you identify which part of the kick is 'punching' through better? does it take all that extra level just to be able to hear the sub? or is it the 'chest thud' that cuts through when doubled? Are you sure the part of the kick on the monitors is the same part on the headphones? Try listening to a small frequency range of the track with a plugin like ISOL8 . start with below 80hz, then try 80 - 200. what does that reveal on each system, and against the references?
'flat' headphones can sound pretty light if you've been listening to a bass heavy system. It might be worth testing to check if your seating position is in a bass pocket. i.e. does the bottom resonate or die when your head is in different locations in the room?
@@Bthelick thanks you've given me something to work with. I know you can't hear my room. It a small room lots of wood furniture in it. Yeah the headphones are what I'm really not sure of. They just sound light as you say compared to my monitors. I'm just trying not figure out what others are actually going to hear. I started using references and it really helped my kick drum choices. And that was my issue I'm like sounds great on my monitors but weak in my headphones. You've helped a lot totally cut down on sound processing because of your advice. Mixs do sound better. Just trying to get this stuff release ready
You can't mix low frequencies on either of those monitoring options. Nearfields don't have enough bass so what you're hearing is probably only the 3rd or 4th harmonic and up of your low frequency content. Headphones do a trick on you because they're very in your face. Need to listen on a larger system to be able to do things properly I'm afraid. Make friends with someone and go to listen there. That's your best bet. And make sure your bass is in key.
Sounds like rominimal house to me! Genre gatekeepers are annoying.