Listening on the best speakers you can get hold of is a good start, but the acoustic response of the room also plays a crucial role. Panning is possibly the simplest solution for reducing the effects of frequency masking, but more advanced methods of altering stereo placement will also work well to overcome frequency conflicts.Ī poor listening environment will only hinder your ability to make reliable judgements and important decisions when it comes to the stereo field (and anything else!). For example, the addition of a guitar part playing in a similar pitch range to a piano part will likely obstruct some of the frequencies of the piano, making it more difficult to hear. When more than one musical sound is playing simultaneously, there’ll usually be a degree of frequency masking.
Learn how to get a wider mix with these stereo width mastering tips. However, making something sound ‘wide’ isn’t always a simple as a bit of left and right panning. Not only will it improve the experience for your listener but can help add clarity and space to your productions.
Triple Cheese is great at adding an odd twist to fairly standard sounds, like this organ preset “Monkey Grinder.Well-balanced, creative use of the full stereo field can, in a lot of cases, be the thing that separates a decent sounding demo from a proper ‘pro’ tune. Yes, some of it’s cheesy too, but it’s the kind of cheesy you’d find in a nightmare about circus clowns, so I’ll take it. It transitions well from glassy staccato sounds to harsh, thick textures.
While other free synths often just give you the basics, Triple Cheese sounds airy and otherworldly. There are also eight effects, two envelopes and an LFO.īut most importantly, Triple Cheese has character. The generators have eight shapes each, the crucial Detune parameter, and even assignable knobs for getting creative with routing. It’s not difficult to use if you understand basic synthesis. Triple Cheese is called a comb synthesizer it uses three stages of comb filter (or very short, tuned delays) to generate signals, rather than oscillators or samplers. But this oddity from the company’s entry in the 2006 KVR Developer Challenge, not only won them the prize, but it also proved to be one of the few unique synth plug-ins you can get for free. You probably know about U-he’s monster synth plug-ins like Zebra, Bazille and the brand-new Hive. Automation is panning the bass within MB-7. There are also two additional compressor plug-ins running inside of MB-7, one each for the two lowest bands.
Because it works with Pro Tools (AAX/RTAS), it can be a sneaky backdoor to let VSTs into Pro Tools sessions.įor this example, a dirty bass patch with plenty of high-end crackle runs for two measures before MB-7 kicks in and removes the high end. MB-7 gives you a fast, easy and powerful way to make sure each track in your song stays inside the frequency range you want. If that weren’t enough, the MB-7's color-coded frequency analyzer display provides great visual feedback when you’re adjusting the frequency and slope of each band’s EQ curve. Then it treats each band like it’s own track on a mixing console, letting you boost, adjust or kill the band entirely solo, mute or pan it and you can even apply two AU/VST plug-ins on each frequency band. Place the MB-7 on a DAW track, and the plug-in separates the incoming audio into as many as seven frequency multibands. If you like to micro-manage your tracks when mixing, Blue Cat’s MB-7 could be just the thing for you.