New Monday #32
Happy Monday!
I am guessing most of you don’t know Hawksley Workman. He’s Canada’s answer to the question, “What if Prince and Bowie had a baby?”. He plays everything, sings, composes, engineers, sometimes records entire songs in a single day, veering all over the map musically. Is it cabaret? Is it alternative? Is it noise? Only Ryan Corrigan (his real name) knows for sure.
Two Hawksley videos, and both are so worth a watch.
The first... early in his career, shot in one take and a Juno Award winner: Jealous of Your Cigarette. This is the best use of two and a half minutes ever.
And this, from a few years ago: Young and Wasted. Another simple idea, beautifully executed. What a melody, and what a voice to sing it.
Just one more - live mayhem in a studio. Teenage Cats. When I grow up I want to not care what anyone thinks as much as this guy.
After that 'Young and Wasted' song I feel like crying and missing my past. Oh well, onward...
Puff Puff Fun and Tips
We usually have a few specific use cases in mind when we design plugins. Like the Amplified Instrument Processor: it’s designed to go on electric guitar buses. But then it winds up on vocals, reverb returns, the master, all sorts of applications beyond its original scope.
Of course, this is exactly what’s supposed to happen. Plugins should add to your creativity and spark ideas. It’s never a bad thing to think, “How would this sound if I did this with it?"
We get a lot of new uses from you all, and here are two that I think are especially useful applications of the Puff Puff mixPass.
#1 Puff to Even Out Levels
Frase is a producer, composer, singer, engineer, bassist, multi-instrumentalist. A Canadian, like Hawksley.
Frase performs live and it’s a blend of DJ’ing and live singers, dancers, and players, with backing tracks served up by Ableton.
What’s been a problem for Frase is that he’s using material recorded across several years, mixed and mastered in different studios, and loudness is inconsistent because of different amounts of limiting and compression. Adjusting level doesn’t really work, and adding additional compression is a non-starter.
Frase’s solution: he runs the individual tracks through individual instances of the Puff Puff mixPass and then matches loudness by ear. Because the Puff Puff isn’t a compressor or limiter, the actual meter levels don’t really change, but the apparent loudness does. Once he tweaks the loudness, he bounces the tracks and he’s set.
This is the critical thing about the Puff Puff MixPass: it makes things LOUDER without really affecting amplitude.
#2 Puff to Undo Limiting
Another tip/application courtesy of Jason Soudah. Jason is another one of those guys that can play everything, sings, engineers, produces, composes, but the bulk of his work is in film and TV scoring. And he’s not Canadian.
Jason has been working on a major film soundtrack, and he’s riding herd over hours worth of music with thousands of tracks and an ungodly plugin count.
One of the critical things he has to do is make alternate mixes for different uses — with vocals, without, for live use, as a backing track, mixes for different languages, etc. But depending on the type of mix, there can be lots of minor alterations throughout. For instance, the horns might be pulled down a bit during vocal sections, but when it’s an instrumental only mix, then the horns are going up and down all over the place, so the automation needs to be re-written. And then that track is feeding through a limiter on the mix bus, but because the mix might be missing things, the way the limiter is responding can be weird, like it pushing down swells and sucking the excitement out of things.
So, Jason’s been running mixes through the Puff Puff AFTER the limiter, using it to restore loudness and match levels with other mixes. As a side benefit, the Puff tends to increase dynamic range because of the way it affects transients, resulting in bigger and brighter mixes without losing headroom, and in some cases gaining headroom.
Vault of Marco
Oh, that Marco... you never know what comes out of his vault... wonderful song by Big Star.
Lovely recording of acoustic guitars - small diaphragm Neumanns through a Spectrasonics console into an LA-176.
Something upbeat and gorgeous to one through the work of the week calls. Y’all be cool.
Luke
