Symbolic Sound has published on their blog called “the eight nerve”, an interview with sound designer Sylvain Lasseur talking about his use of Kyma system and several aspects about his work.

Sound designer Sylvain Lasseur is not just bi-coastal; he’s bi-contintental, working part time in Paris and part time in Los Angeles!  We recently had a chance to ask him a few questions about how he uses Kyma for 5.1 sound design and to explore some of the differences between post production work in Paris and Los Angeles.  By the end of the interview, the discussion turns to food, wine, and the Marx Brothers.  Read on!

New article of Mix Magazine dedicated to sound effects, featuring sound editors Harry Cohen, Christopher Assells and Jon Title.

From the clang of a sword to the roar of a monster to the rev of a car engine, Hollywood directors depend on sound designers and sound effects editors to craft the sonic elements that help add impact and interest, set the mood or ratchet up the terror of a scene. Working with Foley artists, re-recording mixers, composers and others, the creators of film sound effects have challenging jobs that require imagination, creativity and technical abilities, not to mention a great ear.

There are two primary job titles for those who create and edit effects—sound designer and sound effects editor—though the differences between the two job descriptions have become blurred over time, and both are essentially involved in effects creation.

To learn more about the techniques used to create effects for films, Mix spoke with three pros at Soundelux (Hollywood), all with sound designer and sound effects editor credits to their name. Harry Cohen has worked on such titles as Inglourious Basterds, Star Trek, Robin Hood, The Green Lantern and The Perfect Storm. Chris Assells has credits on films like Fright Night, The Green Hornet, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and Gladiator. Jon Title’s filmography includes Final Destination 5, Red, Blood Diamond and The Bourne Ultimatum.

Continue reading…

Vía musicofsound

I want to write a series of relatively small ‘thought for the day’ type articles on a variety of topics. In the first, I want to expand on something that came up in the introductory interview, when I said that my main advice to people entering into their careers should learn when to stop.

One of the things that I love and admire, not only in sound, but in filmmaking and art in general, is economy. And I do not economics. but by economy, I mean simply:

“To achieve the maximum effect for the minimum effort.”

My favorite example of that statement is found in the movie Harold and Maude. I’m going to spoil something, so if you haven’t seen the film, you might want to skip the rest of this paragraph. There is a shot in that movie, I haven’t counted the frames, but I’d be shocked if it was longer than 20 or 30 frames total, that is the best example I’ve ever found. Harold and Maude are sitting near a garbage dump, and she’s describing how glorious seagulls are. There is an insert shot, so short that most people miss it, to Maude’s arm, where you can make out what appears to be a tattoo. A number. And when you realize what the shot is, a concentration camp tattoo, and you understand that Maude survived the concentration camps, the entire movie changes. What was a wacky story of an eccentric old weirdo becomes something a whole lot more powerful. Suddenly Maude makes sense. In one shot, she goes from crazy old lady to concentration camp survivor, and her actions, her very being, suddenly explained.

But for something so powerful, something so important, Hal Ashby made the decision to keep the shot on frame for such a short duration that many people miss it. I can’t think of a director today who would have taken one of the most important pieces of information for truly understanding the film, and letting most viewers miss it. Hal Ashby was an editor before he became a director. And he must have somehow known the exact length of the insert that a percentage of the people would get it, and a percentage wouldn’t. Regardless, the insert itself is such a great reminder in general of how much can be done with so little. One little shot, a second or so in length, can change your entire experience watching this film. I’ve seen the film at least a dozen times. It’s certainly in my top ten of favorite films, and Hal Ashby one of my favorite directors.

One of my favorite books of all time is The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Seemingly a children’s book written by an adult, it’s really a book written by a child for adults who have lost their way. I had never read it as a child, a good friend gave me a copy while at USC film school, along with the Graham Greene novel The Power and the Glory, and Graham Greene was also a master of economy, and quickly became one of my favorite authors. But Saint-Exupéry also wrote one of the most beautiful books every written, Wind Sand and Stars, about his time spent in the desert after his plane crashed. And in addition to those two brilliant books, he’s also the author of one of my favorite quotes, and really the idea behind this post:

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

I wish I had found that quote, and understood it, long ago in my career. So to all of you starting out, memorize those words.

In sound, what I’ve found after years of editing, is that after I’ve completely cut a scene, after I believe I’ve added everything that’s needed, I’m able now to go back and delete about half of what I’ve cut. In every case, the result is a much more defined track.

I remember cutting the backgrounds for The Fellowship of the Ring. I didn’t actually have a lot of editing credits before being invited to go down to New Zealand, so I certainly felt a lot of pressure on myself to try and do exceptional work. I mentioned that I love cutting rain. So I was delighted when I saw the scene of the Hobbits entering Bree, and I saw so much rain. Real rain, down-pouring rain, rain on fences, lanterns, thick cotton cloaks. Rain into mud puddles and rain blowing sideways.

So I cut. And then I cut some more. And then a bit more, convinced that every piece I was adding, was adding ‘something’ to the layering of rain. That each new piece was filling in some piece of the puzzle that had been missing until I added it. And soon I had well over 100 tracks of rain, divided into three predubs. The first was for background steady rain, the far-field rain, the stuff that was to provide the bed. The second predub held all the midfield type rain, sweeteners designed to help sell the perspective cuts between all the shots. The third predub the individual rain sweeteners, the rain on the lantern, the rain on cloth, the rain drips from the gate. The problem was that each of these premixes themselves were also over-cut. The background rains had way too many layers, and although I couldn’t hear it at the time, were already muddy and thick, definition gone. The midfield rains were each 10 or 12 tracks layered together too, and I can still picture Chris Boyes, who mixed the FX, staring blankly as I tried to talk him through it all on the mix stage.

Right then and there on the mix stage we started to delete things, there was no other choice. All the material we needed was there luckily, but it became a game to find the pieces that actually were needed, and weed out all the stuff that was making it sound bad. Of course, as I had been editing that scene, I had convinced myself that ever piece I was adding was adding something. Why?

Here we find one of the problem with our brains. Our brains lie to us! All that work, my brain wouldn’t let me know the truth. That most of it should have been deleted before I took it to the mix stage. There were of course other reasons. I had wanted so hard to do a good job. We had a long schedule, and I had a lot of time to cut. I was more worried about having something missing, that I couldn’t see that I could be bringing too much material. But first and foremost, my brain lied to me, and told me that everything I had put there was necessary.

In the end I’m sure about 20% of the rain I cut was all we needed for that scene. As my library has grown, and my rain collection has grown, with better and more articulate pieces I could now probably cut that scene again with half as many tracks again as we ended up using back then.

So here’s an exercise that every editor should do with his or her tracks when they’re done cutting. Go through, track by track, effect by effect, and mute, one at a time, each one. Then play over that section that contained it. If, in the mix of your work, in the overall layering of all your material, you can’t tell when something is muted or not, delete it. Learn early on not to be precious about anything that you have cut, so that you have no emotional attachment to it. So that with an objective ear, you can simply start taking away.

In the case of something like an explosion, my first pass will usually layer about 10 or 12 elements, to build the overall sonic event. When I then go through, muting and playing, I usually find that at least 3 or 4 of those elements, in the overall layering, simply are no longer ‘doing’ anything. So they go. Same for backgrounds, same for everything. If I can no longer hear it ‘missing’ when I mute it, it doesn’t belong.

I find this test especially useful in creature design. Creatures are the thing that I find get muddy the fastest. On John Carter, I recently had to make some sounds for a creature. We had used some of my sounds from another movie in our first temp, but as we started to see animation come in, it was clear these were totally the wrong pace anyway. So I decided to start over from scratch. Our amazing assistant and recordist, Nia Hansen, had recorded for me a lot of new animals, and with those and some of my own, I went about making a new set. But in the end, they didn’t quite work either. What had happened was that once again, I had overdone it, layering too many things, each time convincing myself that I was adding something, when in fact, all I was doing was killing any character, and any dynamics, by layering and layering over and over different animals sounds, I ended up with ‘Generic Screamy Monster Sound’. The difficulty is that when you’re working on it, that lousy brain of yours lies again and again. It took a playback for the director to realize myself that it wasn’t right, and it clearly wasn’t working for him yet as well.

And so one last time, I threw out most of what I had done, going back to the new recordings, but this time, really working with them on a much smaller scale, a much simpler one, finding the right ‘pieces’ instead of the right ‘layerings’, and created an entirely new pallet of vocal pieces. And then I went into editing mode, and trying to limit myself to this new pallet, recut the vocals for this scene once again. And this time it worked. I was happy with the result, but more importantly, the director and the clients were happy. The scene played clean and powerful, it was articulated, and in my opinion, the vocals have a lot of character and sound unique.

The same logic now applies for me to plugins and processing. I know many people, and I certainly do this too, tend to chain plugin after plugin to create elaborate processing chains. When I find myself doing the same, I start bypassing the plugins, and usually I find fairly quickly that the sound becomes better, not worse. Too many plugins tend to result in the same ‘processed’ sound that tends to rob sounds of their uniqueness. We tend to think that each plugin should be changing the sound, making it more unique. But I often find quite the opposite. Each plugin in the chain often reduces dynamic range, often frequency range, and in the end, you’re left with something now called ‘The generically processed version of something that used to resemble a sound effect’.

So that’s my advice. Learn where the delete/mute/bypass keys are, and make friends with them.

And always remember what Michelangelo said:

“Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.”

Or this one, which he also said:

“I saw the Angel in the marble and I carved until I set him free.”

When you are done building all your tracks, treat them as a block of stone, and carve away!

That may seem a strange way to think about your own material, but that’s how I’ve come to think of the sounds that I record, that I cut, that I design, and that I mix. They all have to be treated with the same irreverence and detachment. They’re all just blocks of stone, of sound. On Prince of Persia, Ken Fisher and I decided that after he cut and we premixed the big finale reel, that we would take some time, going through the premixes and mute things. We muted a lot. We didn’t want to mute everything before we premixed because possibility some of it would be needed in the final. But we were pretty sure what we would need and not need, so we took the liberty of muting I would say about 20% of our predub material, being pretty confident that once music was in, once everything was playing, that you wouldn’t miss it. It was never heard again. Not once did anyone on the stage call for it, and it was never missed.

Now to go back and delete about 20% of this article before it get posted…

René Coronado has recently published a fantastic three-part article on gun recording, including details on pre-production, reports of the sessions, how was the editing/tagging process and more.

So a little while back I packed up the mics and headed out west to record some gunfire with my friends. Not because I had a project that required it or anything, but just because they have lots of guns and I have lots of mics. Also, weapon recording is one of those techniques that requires experience and iteration, so any opportunity to do this type of recording is to be seized upon.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

This month’s issue of AudioMedia magazine has an article with the audio team of Battlefield Bad Company 2.

Read it here.

Recording sound effects on a stage is much like eating at a fine restaurant. You know the fancy kind with fresh baked bread and a different piece of silverware for each course. Recording sound effects in the field is more like hunting for food with a rock and then eating your kill in the middle of the woods raw with your bare hands. One method is obviously preferred. However, not everyone can afford fine dining.

For Christmas this year, we gave away a free copy of the Sound Effects Bible Hard Drive to the winner of a video contest we held. Michael Chobot’s video “Sound Hunter Promo” perfectly demonstrated what field recording is all about. In the sound effects world, sounds are not handed to you on a silver platter. Sometimes you have to get your hands dirty and go primal with your microphone. Let’s discuss some hunting techniques.

Hunters head out into the woods wearing camouflage to blend into their environment and not be seen by their prey. Recording is the opposite. When recording, you want to camouflage the background noise or acoustic environment so that it can not be seen (heard) by your microphone. In my experience, the single biggest challenge in field recording is isolating the sounds.

Here are a few examples and tips to help you bring home the bacon.

Turn the lights off!

Recently we were recording net swishes in a basketball court. The sound itself is fairly quiet, so we needed to make sure that room was quiet. The problem we encountered was the buzzing light ballasts overhead. So, we recorded in the dark – a little tricky when trying to make a basket, but very effective for isolating the sound. It’s a good idea to bring a work light and a flashlight to locations where you anticipate turning off the lights.

Turn everything else off!

Last month, my team and I headed out to “Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum”  to record an insane amount of arcade games, including some rare antiques from the turn of the century. This place was a gold mine! They had ski ball, vending machines, change machines, candy machines, antique bells, phones, even an ATM machine. The problem was there were too many machines making noise all at once. So, we cut the power to the building and worked in the dark. But, we needed to run power to each machine we were recording. To do this, we kept one breaker on and used a hundred foot extension cord to supply power to the machines.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Turn off the heating / air conditioning!

Nothing will spoil your perfect take of an office phone ring than the low rumble of heating and cooling systems. Instead of recording in an office, it now sounds like you’re recording in a hallway aboard the Starship Enterprise. Some buildings have zoned systems which will allow you to turn off the heating and cooling systems for the area where you are recording. Other buildings work on a single system that might not allow you to do this. You can try closing the vents in your area as well as stuff blankets or other items in front of them to stop air flow. In a pinch, you can use low cuts on your recorder, but this will affect your recordings.

Sound blankets!

Sound blankets (a.k.a. furniture moving pads or “furni pads” for short) are wonderful tools for damping reverb in a room, reducing vibrations from a rattling object or to even catch the shells being ejected from a gun while recording. They’re pretty easy to get a hold of (www.markertek.com/Acoustic-Materials/Sound-Blankets/VAN-PAD-BLACK.xhtml) and can be very useful problem solvers. Mic stands with boom arms can make nifty stands to hold your sound blankets if you turn the boom arm perpendicular to the ground, forming a “T” shape. Spring clamps can also be helpful for mounting sound blankets in difficult places.

Use a shotgun mic!

Shotgun mics are my personal favorite mics to use in the field for isolating sound. Their polar pattern allows you to point the mic at a sound source and virtually focus only on that sound. When recording at a location with distant traffic, positioning the mic in the opposite direction of the traffic can greatly diminish the noise produced by the cars. Once you arrive at a location, turn on the mic, put on a pair of headphones and point the mic in every direction. Sound comes from 360 degrees, so don’t forget to point the mic up and down as well. This will help you determine what directions to avoid when recording.

Loose the shotgun mic!

Like all superheroes, shotgun mics have their weakness. Reverberant rooms can create weird and unpleasant artifacts when using a shotgun mic. If this is the case, swap the shotgun out for a cardioid mic. Your recordings will sound more natural. Use your ears to make this call. Sometimes, shotguns can work well indoors. With recording, there are no absolute rules, just guidelines.

Get up close and personal!

The inverse square law is your friend! This mathematical formula basically states that sound pressure level is reduced by half (-6bB) every time you double the distance of the source to the microphone. In practice, this means that your sound source will be louder if you place the microphone closer – common sense, right? The benefit of doing this is that you are increasing source level and therefore reducing the background level. The drawback is that if you get the source too close to the mic, you will get the proximity effect (an artificial increase of lower frequencies). This can be a good thing and a bad thing depending on your sound source. Paper movement miked too close can produce enough low frequencies to rattle your fillings loose in the edit suite. In these cases, you’ll need to roll off the low end to make the sound effect seem more natural.

Point the mic at the sound source!

Duh! But, it’s not always as obvious as you might think. When miking a drawer, don’t point the mic at the handle. Instead, point the mic at the source of friction, which is where the sound is actually coming from. If you can mic the drawer from underneath, as with some desks, you’ll achieve better recordings. With other drawers, such as dressers, you’ll need to mic near the side corner that exposes the track that the drawer is riding on. The same technique can be applied to door squeaks. The hinges of the door are what usually produces the squeak. With some doors, you might find that there is one hinge that is more vocal than the rest. So, point the mic at the noisiest hinge and not the door itself. This falls into my “listen with your ears, not with your eyes” mantra. When deciding mic placement, experimentation is key. Find the sound. Don’t assume where the sound is coming from.

Listen critically!

As humans, we quickly adapt to the acoustics of the environment that we’re in. It only takes a minute of being in a noisy environment before our brains begin to tune out the background and focus on certain things. This is why bars and restaurants get away with playing obnoxious music on Friday nights. People go to these establishments to socialize – to communicate with each other. This is possible because after a few minutes, the music becomes less intrusive on their conversation. Of course, they’ll wake up the next morning with hoarse voices from shouting all night. It’s easy to get lulled by the background noise or acoustics of the location where you’re recording. It’s important to take a moment at the beginning of the session to really analyze your location with headphones. What do you hear? What can you change? It can be a bummer to record for several hours only to come back to the studio and notice background problems in your tracks.

It all comes down to trial and error. With practice and lots of experimentation, you’ll start to get the hang of it. The secret to becoming a good field recordist is to keep recording. Record everything! Then listen to what you’ve recorded. What could you have done differently? Learn from your mistakes. Its one thing to read about recording to get the basics, but it’s another thing to put those basics into practice in the field. Who knows, you might even come up with some cool tricks to share with the rest of us!

The March issue of Audio Media magazine is available now and, along other interesting stuff, it features an article on voice/dialog recording, ADR, voice acting, etc; and also an insight on the production sound of “127 Hours”.

Audio Media Magazine – March 2011

Vancouver Sun recentlty published an article featuring Craig Berkey, sound designer and re-recording mixer on “True Grit”.

When Craig Berkey quit his job at a BC Tel subsidiary to study sound recording, the company president called him in.

“‘He said ‘I’ve seen people do this before,’ ” recalls Berkey, 48. ” ‘It’s okay, I’ll leave a slot [open] for you, because usually people go away and wind up coming back because they can’t get another job.’ ”

But Berkey didn’t fit the mould.

He was so good at sound recording, he wound up teaching at Columbia Academy at the same time he was studying there.

Two decades later, the Burnaby native is one of the top sound designers in the film business. Sunday night, he’s up for two Academy Awards for his work in the Coen Brothers’ acclaimed remake of True Grit, for sound editing and sound mixing.

Working with the Coen Brothers has been fruitful -he also received an Oscar nomination for his work on their film No Country For Old Men.

Currently he’s working on the next X-Men film, X-Men First Class. It’s slated to come out in June, which means he’ll have three movies out in three months -he worked on a thriller called Hanna that comes out in April, and a Terrence Malick movie called The Tree of Life that comes out in May.

Continue reading…

Thanks to Matteo Milani for the link.

As the Bagger discovered last season, it’s almost impossible for even the Academy’s experts to predict who will win the Oscars for sound design and mixing. But over the weekend, the sound team from “Inception” won Baftas from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts , and the group — sound designer Richard King, recording mixer Ed Novick and re-recording mixer Gary Rizzo, along with his partner Lora Hirschberg — have been talked up all season long for their work on Christopher Nolan’s film, for which they are all nominated for Oscars. Creating a soundtrack for his multilevel dreamscape thriller involved technical and creative challenges born of multiple locations and complicated storytelling.

“A notion that Chris had was the idea that a sound occurring in reality, for instance a gunshot, in the next level down might be a peal of thunder, and in the next level down, might be an earthquake,” Mr. King explained. “He wanted there to be some kind of connection, and sound seemed to be the way to do it.”

The Bagger spoke to the group by phone recently. Mr. Rizzo told us to identify him by his “helium-oriented voice” – “as a dialogue mixer.” He added: “I tend to pay attention to the different timbers of voices, it’s one of the things I enjoy about the job.” And Mr. Novick volunteered that he can diagnose an actor’s head cold before anyone else via his trusty microphone. Mr. King revealed that he views sound as a sort of trademark; when he creates identifiable noises for a particular movie, he doesn’t reuse them. We spoke about Mr. Nolan’s emotional approach to his work, his unique resistance to looping dialogue and his Oscar snub.

Continue Reading…

Via @soundesignblog

Continuing with this series of articles dedicated to explore the Waves Sound Design Suite, now let’s move to a very special plugins included in the suite. I’m talking about the amazing Renaissance and the (recently added) V-Series.

The Sound Design Suite doesn’t include the whole Renaissance Maxx Suite, but it includes enough tools for sound design purposes. All those Renaissance plugins were based on vintage gear, so all they add a really nice warmth to the signal processed.

The same happens with the V-Series, three plugins that were also modeled from vintage gear. These plugins were recently added to the Sound Design Suite, and although they’re not “essential” tools, it’s very useful to have plugins with such incredible vintage warmth. The processors included were modeled from different hardware processors of Neve, including several legendary models, such as the 2254 compressor and the 1073, 1066 and 1081 equalizers.

Let’s explore each of those tools. Starting with the Renaissance plugins:

Renaissance Equalizer

REQ is a very intuitive equalizer, pretty similar to Q10 in terms of control, but this time the filter curves were modeled from vintage analog equalizers, so the signal coloration is different but really cool. I use this one as my default EQ for shaping sound effect frequencies, but I’ve also used it in the past for music, dialogue and all kind of tasks. It comes in 2, 4 and 6 band versions and supports both mono and stereo components.

It has typical parametric controls for each band, including gain, frequency and Q. Also, each band can be easily activated/deactivated. You can also control the curves graphically and more quickly, by using the keyboard and mouse combinations. It’s pretty cool.

If you’re already familiarized with EQs, you’ll not have any problems with RenEQ. In terms of control and parameters, it’s pretty similar to any other EQ in the market, but, in terms of sound quality and warmth, it’s a very unique processor. It adds a really nice flavor to your sound. I personally recommend it for sound editing/design tasks, both for subtle and heavy operations.

“The RenEQ is often a part of my channel strip. Going down to 16Hz it is mainly used in the 2 band variation as a low-cut. That works perfectly for me to make sure there are no uncontrollable ultra low frequencies – especially on synthesizers or plug-ins that create weird stuff in the low end.” - Axel Rohrbach

“A longtime favorite for ease-of-use. When I transfer sounds from Soundminer into Pro Tools, this plugin will often be part of that chain.” – Charles Deenen

Renaissance Compressor

This is one of my favorite compressors. It was created for compresion and expansion tasks, by implementing technologies from C1 and L1. RComp integrates a brickwall limiter in the output and also supports sidechain. This compressor is very flexible and can be perfect for many things, including both soft and hard dynamic control. What you get is a natural and flexible (analog modeled) sound loaded with precision and control from the digital world. As Waves said: “Analog punch. Digital Precision”

RenComp offers parameters that you can find typically in a compressor, including attack, release, threshold, ratio, gain and also the possibility of change the compression mode (Vintage Opto and modern Electro). Threshold and Gain feature an integrated signal meter and the ratio has a special meter that shows the amount of attenuation/expansion present in the process. That’s also great because gives you instant information about the process you’re applying to the signal.

The Renaissance Compressor is a perfect “average” compressor. I use it a lot for general dynamic control. It has a natural sound and easy user interface for quick access to the important parameters. I also love it as a side chain compressor in different situations. – Axel Rohrbach

“My go-to “regular” compressor. It’s transparent enough when you don’t want to hear it, and can pump when you want it to. Often I’ll use two in a row– one to “level” things a bit with a long attack/release, and one to slightly compress things. Also works great on voiceovers. I’ve tried many other compressors, but seem to always come back to this one.” – Charles Deenen

Renaissance Axx

RAxx is a nice tool that simplifies dynamics processing into three parameters: Threshold, Attack and Gain. That’s all. The rest of the parameters are fixed, so this one is not a very flexible tool, but it’s very easy and quick to use and that is the goal here. It was created originally for guitar and bass, but it works pretty good on sound effects and different kinds of tracks, applying a very special kind of compression (or limiting).

One of my favorite plug ins. I always use this if I need harsh and crispy compression / limiting. This works well on explosions, gunshots, crashes, animals – pretty much everything thing. – Axel Rohrbach

Renaissance Bass

Now it’s turn for the last of the Renaissance plugins that are included in the suite. This one is a quite powerful tool that has gained a lot of popularity between sound designers. RBass is a fantastic plugin based on Waves MaxxBass proprietary technology that uses psycho-acoustic principles to enhance the signal by adding harmonics and extending an specific range of frequencies.

It was created especially for extending the low frequency content on any sound. The frequency cutoff has an extended range of 32Hz to 256Hz and the intensity can go from -24dB to +24dB, which only means one thing: you can go as subtle or extreme as you want. You could use this bad guy for a lot of things, like adding just a bit of weight to a sound, creating fat and low sweeteners, or just to make an impact bigger.

Its controls are very intuitive, including three main parameters: frequency, intensity and gain. The frequency sets where the plugin begins to add harmonics. The amount of the harmonics added is controlled by the intensity. Also, it offers metering for the original bass, the harmonics added and the output gain. You’ll find you using this plugin in a lot of things. From making deep and low content to just adding some body to a sound. It’s one of those tools that you’ll want to use on a lot of different things.

“Another Plug-In that is used on nearly all of my projects. Used in a chain with Lo-Air, this is the killer LFE combination. I also use RBass sometimes very subtle with the frequency set pretty high to beef the sound up by creating some more harmonics.” – Axel Rohrbach

“It’s been my go-to “beefinizer” for many years; I probably use it every day. Stacking two of them up at different frequencies makes both the sub and mid-range bigger. Even at zero dB, it adds a significant amount of low end.” - Charles Deenen

“It adds “body & punch” to a sound. I use it to beef up sounds without depending on the LFE channel.” – Scott Martin Gershin

Here’s an interesting video with an overview of the MaxxBass technology:

Click here to view the embedded video.

V-EQ3

V-EQ3 is an equalizer modeled from the Neve 1073 and 1066 (combining both). It features three bands of filters with frequency and gain controls and also a high pass filter that has a range of 45Hz to 360Hz.

I use this equalizer mostly when I need to give certain color to a sound, specially treating the mid frequencies range. Also, since the cutoff points are fixed and the filters were modeled exactly from the hardware processors, what you get is a very unique EQ with classic sound and modern control. You can also get less vintage sound, by turning off the “Analog” button you see below the output.

V-EQ4

V-EQ4 was modeled from the Neve 1081. It’s similar to the V-EQ3, but this time it features four bands and offers both LP and HP filters. There’re controls for low, low-mid, mid-high and high frequency ranges. LMF and HMF also includes a HiQ button.

I find these equalizers very useful to retouch the sounds you’re making. If you’re looking for a modern sound, or you want an EQ for surgical tasks or detailed frequency operations, V-EQs are not the tools for the job. These processors are created specially to create a vintage feel and add an “specific” coloration to the signal. Think about this like salt: adding just the right amount to change the “flavor” of your recipe.

“I like the way it fattens things up, adding warmth and color to the sound.” – Scott Martin Gershin

V-Comp

V-Comp follows the same concept. This one was modeled from the Neve 2254 hardware compressor/limiter, which deliver a true legendary vintage sound. V-Comp can be a great tool for treating single sound effects and also mix busses.

This processor offers several common controls, as well as some special features. It offers a compression section and a limiting section. The compressor features ratio and release control. Threshold is not there, since V-Comp was modeled from a console master bus compressor, where the threshold was driven by the master fader. In V-Comp, that setting would be the the input. The limiting section offers level control and also several options for fixed attack and release settings.

V-Comp also features an “Analog” parameter, which controls the amount of analog modeling and harmonic distortion. In other words, it helps you to change the color of the compressor and find different characteristics for your tasks.