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Dan is also not afraid to call out short comings in the bundled FX with all sorts of Draws. Which is fascinating and informative.

If it is good enough for Dan Worrall, it's good enough for me. Without doubt the best engineering slanted explainations of things sound and DAW related are on his channel. https://youtube.com/c/DanWorrall He does videos on Fabfilter's channel too, as well as the Tokyo Dawn Records 'Introducing' videos. He also swears by Reaper. Here's a video which shows an application of Reaper's routing that I don't know of another DAW that can quite match. I've used variants of this for mastering for a while, parallel compression on just the mid band is a very very powerful tool in my arsenal.

Or to put the other point of view, any DAW that doesn't come equipped with the kind of routing power of Reaper, down to phase inversion of aux sends, is really just a midi editor playing at being a DAW.

OS willy waving is such a load of bollocks. Macs are great, then you get a version discrepancy that absolutely flips you bloody. And Apple are bastards only out to get money out of your pocket in as many and varied ways as possible. Windows is brilliant, until you get an appalling update snafu that blows away a few weeks of your life getting out of. Reinstalling everything several times whilst restarting in safe mode for the umpteenth time. Linux is brilliant, until a driver goes to stinky poo and you spend 6 months trying to find a fix then resort to writing your own solution. Yeah as a professional software engineer I have used them all in anger, and more, Solaris is the real deal, Linux is a toy, etc etc. They are all flakey as stinky poo if you push them juuuust so....

1 cab, 3 basses, 2 amps, 4 straps, 2 fretwrap damper thingies, a couple of sets of strings and a partridge in a pear tree.... Not all have been easy or gone perfectly, but Mark has always worked through issues fairly and as quickly as he can. And yeah both Mark and I love to chat, we've spent hours and hours waffling on 😆

A huge part of an 1176 is the saturation it adds. The original big Cali had some of that, and they did a Lundahl transformer version that would have some different flavoured saturation from the original. I would like to know if any of the other pedal based FET 76 'clones' actually do this too, given how rare it is to find a rack 76 clone that manages to do so.

Yeah, one of its strengths for me is it is very lightweight and super robust. I've done some really huge mixes on a laptop over ten years old (120 tracks and more).

Python is a superb example of a truly intuitive language, especially compared to C++, which has had so many bolt ons a rejigging it's forgotten what it set out to be, or Javascript which was initially written in two weeks, and suffered from interminable updates, not one of which has had the balls to properly sort it's gargantuan failings. It's powerful, sure, it's also utterly stinky poo, and I spent 15 years with it as a major part of my role, so I have enough real world experience of it to draw a damning conclusion 😂 The other advantage of python is it runs fastr than any other language in AWS Lambda micro-services. I love python, 3 hours to learn, a decade to master; I've used it daily for at least 15 years.

I'm a software architect by trade. Big stuff with huge data is my bread and butter. But a solution with a hard to understand UI or poor UX is not ever going to cut the mustard, it has to be intuitive. That's not to say anyone can use it without knowledge of the subject, but it should always guide such a user to make appropriate choices.

The really clever bit about setting up your own linear phase crossover of course is that you can get even more clever with per band parallel compression. I feel I may be breaking some people's heads now, I'll bugger off and leave you all to it

What can be achieved with some mic position knowledge, a bunch of free vsts and a capable DAW these days is absolutely ridiculous.

If you want to do multiband - and its a worthwhile thing to experiment with - then might I siggest not going to your nearest multiband compressor to do it. If you use Reaper its perfectly possible to set up a linear phase crossover with the supplied plugins and its very clever routing, as described here:- Personally I would be looking at using this with compressors/saturators on each band of my choice. Molotok might be excellent in this role for the low end or mids. I would put Nova on the main input channel to de-ess first, then go from there into the crossover, apply compression/saturation to the different bands as required, back out to the combined channel and then add an aux to the ambience. I would also recommend Kotelnikov for a final extra light compression if required. Its sounds more complex than it is in practice. https://www.tokyodawn.net/tdr-nova/ https://www.tokyodawn.net/tdr-kotelnikov/ https://www.tokyodawn.net/tdr-molotok/ https://www.tokyodawn.net/tdr-vos-slickeq/ Definitely watch Dan Worrall's superc 'Introducing' vodeos on those plug ins. They are superb. Some of those Analogue Obsession plugins for a different flavour:- https://www.patreon.com/posts/nos-bundle-49184069 https://www.patreon.com/posts/britpressor-44141645 https://www.patreon.com/posts/specomp-51285294 I would be very surprised if you couldn't get a huge way toward the sound you are looking for with this lot to help. Might be worth looking at the output on voxengo span of the podcasts you like the sound of to help figure out what the 'magic' is? Yet another Dan Worrall video, I come across like a fan boy, but his delivery and engineering nouse are equally superb:- If you want you could send me a wav and I'll set up a project to show you a bit of the processing chain I am talking about - assuming you use Reaper still???

Get/make a good two ply pop shield. Thats the plosives sorted. Get the mic at least 2 inches behind the pop shield off axis by between 30 and 60 degrees -adjust to taste. Download Tokyo Dawn Labs Nova dynamic eq, watch a few videos on how to use it for de-essing, Dan Worrall is yer man btw. Add some very very subtle ambience with a vst, very very subtle mind! One other thing that the nice analogue part of a BBC chain is adding is some very subtle saturation, try an analogue obsession vst for a tiny smidge or the Tokyo Dawn Labs Slick EQ which is the canine undercarriage.

This is a helpful video that may improve your mixes when done with non-ideal kit or circumstances:- https://youtu.be/iZrWMv02tlA

That much Moog makes me sweaty in a somewhat embarrassing way 😍

Metering! You aren't an expert at hearing compression. Your supposition that you are just adding a 'bit' of compression may or may not be accurate at all. Probably if you can hear it, it's a little more than you need, or it's got a typically poor automatic make up gain and is in fact just a bit louder than before and that is tricking you into thinking it's better. Proper control of attack, release, threshold and make up gain, possibly even knee, side chain filtering and wet dry mix are all really useful too. It's a long journey you have taken the first step on. Enjoy it. You'll be after a Becos Twain before you know it 😁

I hate having any spare cable flapping about though, so it's custom lengths for me all day...

Dan Worrall, is one of those chaps who puts the engineer in sound engineer. He does a lot of reviews and intros to Tokyo Dawn Records plugins and Fabfilter plugins. He seriously knows his stinky poo, love his channel. Interestingly he is a huge advocate of Reaper himself. He's not wrong about the plugins having some idiosyncrasies, but interestingly Reaper has been updated to come in line with his suggestions on a few things. I'd recommend anyone wanting to learn a bit more about how the magic happens in Draws to watch everything he's done, and his Tokyo Dawn Records plugins videos as well, there are some awesome features on those that you will miss otherwise!

Reaper it's the canine undercarriage. Used it for tracking, mixing and mastering for well over a decade, since version 3 I think. Best value by far for me, and super super rock solid.

The squareplugs are pretty pricy, fiddly and very finicky wrt cable diameter. But they are really small!

It's had a bit of an upgrade this last year...

So on Sunday we had our first rehearsal for 18 months. Gasp! Not everyone was there, our percussionist is taking a break from music to look after his folks for the foreseeable future as they're old and very frail, our bass trombonist was working overtime and our keys player hasn't had two jabs yet so declined the offer. But nevertheless, drums, bass, guitar and trumpet were all in the house of noise. Its made me realise what a cathartic tonic to the mundane endless DIY/work/parenting cycle of life music making is for me. I truly love these people, they lift my spirit and bring me moments of Zen like peace and joy coupled with boundless energy that I happily pay the price for for days afterwards, then the guitarist farts usually but you have to forgive him this, he's not really house trained yet. Things of note - we may not have been playing but the general kit expenditure through GAS has been relentless, I took along my new Roscoe and my at last finished for now new pedalboard (pictured) with the Becos Twain. Temple Audio boards are almost ridiculously expensive post Covid/Brexit but I actually bought it a while ago (about a 18 months as it happens) in order to fit the Caiman Tail Loop by One Control on there when they were a bit more reasonable. So I bought the Caiman Tail Loop because I had a pedalboard failure in a gig and had to unplug the entire thing - which put me right off my stroke for the rest of the gig. The theory being that a pedal dying wont matter since I can take it out of the loop completely now. Unless its the loop controller of course, there is still that risk. For this alone I give it 10/10. But its absurdly programmable to, meaning when I need to I can set up multiple pedal changes to work at the click of a switch - I can even send midi control messages and channel switching if I ever need to - love a bit of future proofing so I do! The other reason I got this was that my signal chain's low end and punch was noticeably degraded by the pedals all in line. Not noticeable by punters maybe, but by me, and that bugged me no end. I hated knowing I couldn't get all my beautiful bass's tone out if I wanted effects at any point in a gig. For this I give it another 10/10 it has absolutely completely changed everything for me. But not just the tone of my bass alone, any two pedals sound better than they did before too, probably any three but I just don't tend to go there. Most notably is my cheap and nasty octave/'overdrive' pedal, which I always thought had a somewhat anaemic octave output because it was cheap - not so, it now sounds absurdly fat, not quite too much but nearly. All of them sound significantly better for this change - like an entirely new board of fx. Brilliant! In fairness a lot of my pedals are rather cheap and nasty, I rather like them all though, the phaser, a mega chip dirty knock off sounds superb, and gives a little bump in output when engaged which helps. I certainly am not losing low end or punch anymore even though its a lot of cheapy knock off crap really compared to some of the pedal officiandos works of art on here. And then there is the Becos Twain - I have promised an in depth review since I got it, but no playing loud rather rendered that pointless, and in order to give it a really good review I want to use it for a fair bit longer, but in short, its a lot of knobs, it has a very specific and detailed setup process that is not at all obvious, RTFM for sure, but by gum it delivers what I wanted by the bucket load! I can set the top end to clamp down hard and fast on very loud peaks only, which means this, pops get that really nice compressed sound, but fingerstyle and dynamics (which are as much transient to volume ratio as sheer power output) are just untouched in the top end and transient areas. At the same time I can have some healthy punch off the low end, with a slower attack/release whilst the side chain filter stops very low level energy triggering the low side of the device and pulling things down too readily, keeping it all sounding far more natural than it probably seems like it should - these THAT compressor chips are brilliant. It is absolute genius. Although really not for the feinthearted. Does anyone want to buy a Focusrite Compounder? Crikey I haven't even played with the two germanium overdrive circuits on the clean side of the two compression engines I am not the only one to have a major rig overhaul - the guitarist turned up with one of the new Barefaced guitar cabs, a 112, and a brand new Blackstar 50w head which it turns out keeps up with the band at 5w, albeit with a bit of fuzziness and is effortlessly clean when set to 50w, and 3 guitars, one he had before but with all new electronics, and two previously unseen ones. And a complete pedal board upgrade too, Strymon modulation effects are awesome it turns out. Even the drummer had new cymbals! Such a fantastic evening - we've been writing all through lockdown and sharing ideas, but its not the same as trying to play them together, and laughing, and just enjoying actually seeing people again - no office for me means I haven't interacted with people other than direct family for the entire time, except to avoid them in the shops. Its been very strange. Stranger to be getting out and seeing some friends, which just feels wrong. Anyway sorry for the diary entry but it was kinda momentous for me, as you were, carry on....

Might I suggest the Analogue Obsession stuff? https://www.patreon.com/analogobsession All freely downloadable. Some really nice compressors and eqs, channel strips, buss compressors and saturation type stuff. Gets a lot of use by me...

And if you want to know why mastering is audio engineering then buy Bob Katz's masterpiece on the subject. https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0240818962/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_glt_fabc_D85KZN5J9W7DAFAP7A2R