DAW More Cowbell, is it possible?

Jalapeno

Student Of The Blues
Note: I'm really sorry about the poor quality of the audio in this video. Both Ableton and my screen capture software were fighting for my Plantronics headset mic and the volume and quality of the audio ended up all over the map. It took me a while to figure out what was going on but I didn't realize there was a problem until I was done recording and will probably re-record this video, since it is meant for another site and I'm putting it here because it might be of interest to my BGU friends, but maybe you can catch the drift of what's going on. I left the boo boos in and everything, warts too. :)

-- begin content --
I accidently found a new plugin for DAW's that looked like a cool toy on Thursday evening. Yesterday I talked with the sales rep at Sweetwater but the software is too new, they haven't even tried it yet. So being as cautious and conservative as I am with money I bought it and downloaded it.

The original intent of this video was to be an update of an EQ fix video I made a long time ago but since I found the new toy I am using it in the video instead of my old EQ advice. This is the first draft and hopefully you can understand it. It is also my first time trying to do something with the software, since I've only had it a couple of days.

You might want to watch it on Youtube due to the details you might not see when its embedded. I am putting the embedded version here as a preview in case it is useful.

Let me know what you think. If it is passable and leave it as is or completely reshoot it. I forgot to mention in the video that I imported an .mp3 file that was rendered years ago and I was new to mixing and didn't mix it too well. It was originally recorded on a BOSS BR1600 hard disk recorder and though I am sure I could probably find the backup discs to reload and rerecord it wasn't worth trying to find the discs, stems and reload the recorder. Especially for cowbell :)

Thanks,
Eric

https://youtu.be/NdjWj4S4C50

 

CaptainMoto

Blues Voyager
Ha!
First, nice job on the vid.

Second, that "Peel" is very interesting.
I'm thinking I've got lots of tools that might get me there but, not quite as efficiently.

I'm gonna look into that.

thanks.
 

PapaRaptor

Father Vyvian O'Blivion
Staff member
pretty cool tool!
I wish it worked on S1.
If it's a 64 bit plug-in, I think it can be made to work. Studio One doesn't support dual outputs, so it isn't as smooth, but based on @Jalapeno's video and the video from the zplane, it appears you could do it it two passes.
  1. The first would be the track minus the muted section, which you can do an Export Mixdown.
  2. The second would be to invert it, so only the muted section is reproduced and Export Mixdown on that, too. You now have the two tracks (plus the original unmodified track).
  3. Mix and EQ either track to your heart's content.
  4. Export the two channels together (recombining them).
It's the long way around the barn compared to using one of the DAWs which support it.
DAW Multiple Outputs
Ableton Live ✓
Cakewalk x
Cubase x
FL Studio ✓
Logic Pro x
Pro Tools ✓
Reaper ✓
Reason ✓
Studio One x

I can't really be certain without trying it, but they do offer a demo version (hint, hint, @CaptainMoto)
 

MikeS

Student Of The Blues
Staff member
If it's a 64 bit plug-in, I think it can be made to work. Studio One doesn't support dual outputs, so it isn't as smooth, but based on @Jalapeno's video and the video from the zplane, it appears you could do it it two passes.
  1. The first would be the track minus the muted section, which you can do an Export Mixdown.
  2. The second would be to invert it, so only the muted section is reproduced and Export Mixdown on that, too. You now have the two tracks (plus the original unmodified track).
  3. Mix and EQ either track to your heart's content.
  4. Export the two channels together (recombining them).
It's the long way around the barn compared to using one of the DAWs which support it.
DAW Multiple Outputs
Ableton Live ✓
Cakewalk x
Cubase x
FL Studio ✓
Logic Pro x
Pro Tools ✓
Reaper ✓
Reason ✓
Studio One x

I can't really be certain without trying it, but they do offer a demo version (hint, hint, @CaptainMoto)


Cool, If the demo version is available and it isn't hamstrung, I'll play around with it.
 

CaptainMoto

Blues Voyager
If it's a 64 bit plug-in, I think it can be made to work. Studio One doesn't support dual outputs, so it isn't as smooth, but based on @Jalapeno's video and the video from the zplane, it appears you could do it it two passes.
  1. The first would be the track minus the muted section, which you can do an Export Mixdown.
  2. The second would be to invert it, so only the muted section is reproduced and Export Mixdown on that, too. You now have the two tracks (plus the original unmodified track).
  3. Mix and EQ either track to your heart's content.
  4. Export the two channels together (recombining them).
It's the long way around the barn compared to using one of the DAWs which support it.
DAW Multiple Outputs
Ableton Live ✓
Cakewalk x
Cubase x
FL Studio ✓
Logic Pro x
Pro Tools ✓
Reaper ✓
Reason ✓
Studio One x

I can't really be certain without trying it, but they do offer a demo version (hint, hint, @CaptainMoto)

Dual out puts is far from my mind, I'm fascinated by the bubble depiction and using a visual tool to isolate frequencies.
 

PapaRaptor

Father Vyvian O'Blivion
Staff member
Dual out puts is far from my mind, I'm fascinated by the bubble depiction and using a visual tool to isolate frequencies.
I was suggesting you might want to check out the demo and see if you can make it work in S1. I have a full plate of quasi-musical construction projects for the next week or twelve.
 

CaptainMoto

Blues Voyager
I was suggesting you might want to check out the demo and see if you can make it work in S1. I have a full plate of quasi-musical construction projects for the next week or twelve.
OH, I got your hint.
I can relate to other things eating up the available time but, for me, I'm more concerned about available grey matter.

Got a few new toys for X-mas that I'm trying to learn, rewiring my board and entire (complicated) signal path and I just signed up for additional on-line courses.
Add that to some new plugins that are calling my name and .........there ya go:rolleyes:o_O:eek:
Somehow, I've managed to turn my fun into never ending projects and ongoing schooling.

I'll pass on that for now, my brain is beyond capacity.

"quasi-musical construction projects" HMMM?
 

OG_Blues

Guitar Geezer
Dual out puts is far from my mind, I'm fascinated by the bubble depiction and using a visual tool to isolate frequencies.
So, it is apparent that under the hood, they are running real time FFT's on the spectrum and then depicting the results as the bubbles, which
is an unconventional presentation of the data, but quite clever. My question would be how much control does the user have over setting the parameters for the FFT calculations? Might have to take a closer look at this rather than just throwing out academic questions. Not quite sure if I would have any practical use for this, but it would definitely be a fun toy - that's reason enough to satisfy the enablers here, right?
 

Jalapeno

Student Of The Blues
pretty cool tool!
I wish it worked on S1.
Mike, it does work in S1. Like paparaptor says you just have to work a bit harder because it isn't designed for multiple outputs from plugins.

I don't have S1 but Audacity should work just like it. Here is a short video doing the same thing with the cowbell in Audacity. To save time I preloaded Audacity with the Wishing Well track and duplicated it twice to make 3 tracks of the same song.

I then loaded tracks 2 and 3 with PEEL and for track 2 I removed the cowbell, track 3 I removed everything but the cowbell. Then I boosted the cowbell on track 3.

When track 1 is soloed you hear the original track. When I mute track 1 and play tracks 2 and 3 together you get the song with more cowbell.

I dispensed with talking until I figure out what is going on with my screen capture software, but you should be able to see what I'm doing.


I hope that helps.

Eric
 

Jalapeno

Student Of The Blues
So, it is apparent that under the hood, they are running real time FFT's on the spectrum and then depicting the results as the bubbles, which
is an unconventional presentation of the data, but quite clever. My question would be how much control does the user have over setting the parameters for the FFT calculations? Might have to take a closer look at this rather than just throwing out academic questions. Not quite sure if I would have any practical use for this, but it would definitely be a fun toy - that's reason enough to satisfy the enablers here, right?
Yes, the bubbles are a different way of displaying the spectrogram rather than the normal bit map color or grayscale matrix. Short term fast Fourier transformations is the normal way to generate an audio spectrogram as far as I know :) Having spent a lot of time learning to analyze spectrograms I think the bubble interface is perfect for what this plugin is designed to do. Find specific audio information very quickly. Trying to do this with a "heat map" spectrogram may just have too much information to digest quickly. As for user parameters to adjust the calculations this is version 1.0.0 (it's new software) and maybe that will come in an update? I'm not sure adjusting the calculation is necessary when you consider that the plugin is designed to find vocals and instruments really quickly and I think they've got the interface just right for that purpose.

As a side note I'm into Electronic Music and sound design is a big part of the genre. Being able to visually isolate frequencies gives me thousands of ideas how to use this plugin in sound design and how quickly it can be done with PEEL has got me excited :)

Eric
 

Jalapeno

Student Of The Blues
I'm thinking I've got lots of tools that might get me there but, not quite as efficiently.
Yeah, there are lots of tools to do this but this one gets me there quicker than any of them. In the video this one intends to be an update to I did the exact same thing with a multispectral EQ but it took me about an hour to isolate the cowbell and I had to edit the video to get it under 5 minutes (this is from/for my 5 minute fixes series) which made it seem like I'm a genius with EQ (which I'm not) by zeroing in on the cowbell with knobs and sliders. With PEEL it really was a fast as in this video.

Eric
 

MikeS

Student Of The Blues
Staff member
Mike, it does work in S1. Like paparaptor says you just have to work a bit harder because it isn't designed for multiple outputs from plugins.

I don't have S1 but Audacity should work just like it. Here is a short video doing the same thing with the cowbell in Audacity. To save time I preloaded Audacity with the Wishing Well track and duplicated it twice to make 3 tracks of the same song.

I then loaded tracks 2 and 3 with PEEL and for track 2 I removed the cowbell, track 3 I removed everything but the cowbell. Then I boosted the cowbell on track 3.

When track 1 is soloed you hear the original track. When I mute track 1 and play tracks 2 and 3 together you get the song with more cowbell.

I dispensed with talking until I figure out what is going on with my screen capture software, but you should be able to see what I'm doing.


I hope that helps.

Eric

Cool! Thanks!
 

MikeS

Student Of The Blues
Staff member
It's a really interesting tool but it's not magic I guess.
I just tried to isolate the keyboards from a song and I never could isolate the keyboards (I'm sure they share too many frequencies with guitar & vocals).
 

Jalapeno

Student Of The Blues
It's a really interesting tool but it's not magic I guess.
I just tried to isolate the keyboards from a song and I never could isolate the keyboards (I'm sure they share too many frequencies with guitar & vocals).
Yeah, no magic, just good ears and practice. EQing takes lots of practice. You have to train your ears when the mix is dense to listen for the fundamentals and ignore the overtones and harmonics. Then you'll get an idea where the frequencies you are looking for probably exist. Harmonics are generally powers of two from the fundamental. (I think that's the proper mathematical term :) )

It probably is a really dense mix that you have which, if you can clearly hear the keys part, just will take more work to isolate them. A lot more work if you are new to EQ. It also helps if the keys are stereo separated from the guitar. The way to practice is start with a simple mix, maybe like telephone dtmf tones and see if you can use the plugin to isolate each of the sine waves. Then work with a simple track with good transients and frequency separation such as a track with drum and bass guitar. Practice isolating the snare drum, for instance. As you get more practice (it takes a while) you start to hear/see the areas where frequencies are likely.

Each note on the keyboard is a different frequency (which is why they have different pitches) and unlike the cowbell in my demo the transients (the percussive start of a note) are probably not as well defined in the keyboard part. Also, a cowbell has a strong fundamental and the harmonics are fairly close to the fundamental because of the logarithmic display of the spectrogram (the bubbles) so it was easy to grab with a long box that wasn't tall. A keyboard part will probably need a tall, thin box in this plugin. But, again, if the mix is dense you'd have to make a few passes to isolate the keyboard and drop each pass on to a separate track and recombine them later when you got all you can get. Like I said, a lot of work :)

If it is a muddy mix it might be near impossible to separate out the keys without hours of work.

I guess what I'm saying is that you might be starting with too dense of a track and should test out the plugin trial with something simple like I did with the cowbell. I mean you wouldn't hand a violin to a 4 year old who had two lessons and expect her to play the flight of the bumblebee with the NY Philharmonic until she's practiced for a while :)

Yep, no magic, just practice. Sort of like guitar :whistle:

Eric
 
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