1. Serato Pitch ‘n Time
2. TL|Space
3. The GRM Tools

I recently picked up the complete GRM Tools version 3 “Evolution” bundle, and here’s my experience, along with everything else I know about the GRM Tools.

GRM stands for “Groupe de Recherches Musicales,” the original name of a French group of experimental composers and electronic musicians working in the 1960s who pioneered the creation of electronic, electro-acoustic, and (in particular) sampled music using tape loops.  The group’s work was complimentary to work being done at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, a similar institution in England that was founded to create unique sound effects and music for television and radio.  The GRM played a large part in inventing the techniques we use today for pure sound design.

After several revolutions in the French broadcasting establishment, the GRM passed from its original home at the RTF and ORTF, the French public broadcaster, to l’INA, the French national radio and television archives. Now known as INA-GRM, it continues the original mission of the GRM and to that end it produces a collection of different software packages that can be used for sound design and electronic music.  The GRM Tools series is the most visible of these and the one a DAW-based sound effects designer is most likely to run into.

The GRM Tools as a Bundle, coming from Version 1

With version 3 of the GRM Tools INA-GRM has added some new features and a new bundle, the “Evolution” collection of plug-ins.  Cosmetically, the look of all of the plug-ins has been updated, colors tweaked to a slightly higher-visibility gray:

The GRM Doppler plug-in

The GRM Tools plug-ins, in common, still have some of the unique “universal” features that set them apart and make them particularly useful for performance of effects:

• Almost all of the plug-ins give you access to the most interesting parameters in a large X-Y control window.  you can grab the knob in this X-Y space and quickly explore many different combinations, and use the controller to efficiently automate the plug-in on-the-fly against a dynamic signal.
• All of the knob controllers can be changed instantly, or can be made to change at a fixed rate.  By grabbing a slider while holding down the Apple/Command key, the slider will sprout a rubber band, and this rubber band will drag the slider toward your mouse at a fixed rate.  The further away you drag your mouse from the slider while holding the rubber band, the slower the slider will move.
• The plug-ins all have a special “Presets” matrix where 14 different plug-in setting profiles can be retained, independent of the plug-in presets your DAW may save in its presets or snapshot automation scope. Clicking any one of the preset buttons will cause the selected plug-in’s parameters to slowly transition from its current setting to the preset, at a constant speed that is controllable.  Additionally, on these plug-ins Preset 15 will automatically generate a random preset that’s within 10% of the current setting, and Preset 16 will automatically generate a completely random preset.  This is a cool way of exploring the total envelope of options for a particular plug-in against a sound, by loading Preset 16 in succession to listen to vastly different settings, or Preset 15 if you think you’re in a good place but want to hear nearby options.
• The plug-ins all have a “Superslider” at the bottom.  Here you can transition continuously and seamlessly between any 8 presets at whatever speed you choose.  As you slide the Superslider between two presets, the parameters of the plug-in will transition smoothly between the two presets.  Clicking on any of the preset numbers above the Superslider allows you to reassign that particular slot on the Superslider to any preset number.
• For those of you that use a tempo map in your sound work, all time-related parameters and controls in GRM Tools plugins can be set either in seconds/miliseconds, or in bars/beats.  Clicking on a parameter while holding down the Shift key will toggle between these two counting modes.

Along with these, GRM has added a few new features which you may find quite handy.  First, all of the parameters in a GRM plugin may be “agitated” with the two knobs in the center-right.  Almost all of the parameters of a GRM plugin have a red square next to them; this is the agitation toggle for that parameter.  If this is switched on and Agitation is turned on, this value will be randomly twiddled, to the degree and at the speed you select in the agitation controls.

Click here to view the embedded video.

All of the plug-ins now allow you to control all parameters through MIDI; all of the plug-ins will appear as MIDI endpoints in your host when instantiated, and will accept MIDI CC, note, program change and pitchwheel messages to change parameters.  Learning a MIDI control to a plug-in parameter is as easy as touching the parameter you wish to automate and then moving the MIDI control you want to map.  This MIDI map data can be saved in a plug-in preset and can be recalled later.

All of the plug-ins now also give you the ability to load and save presets to files, independent of your host’s preset librarian, as a special GRM-only file with extension “.pGr”.

Finally, all of the GRM plug-in windows are now dynamically-resizeable.  If you grab the lower right-hand corner of any GRM Tools plug-in window, it will let you make the plug-in window larger.  These are the first RTAS plug-ins I’ve ever seen that were able to do this, and I certainly hope they’re not the last.

(Protip: Many of the GRM Tools rely implicitly on the technique of Fourier analysis and resynthesis, splitting a sound into its component frequencies and phases, manipulating those and then mashing them all back together again.  A familiarity with how discrete-time Fourier transforms work, their parameters and their limitations, will definitely give you an edge when working with these plug-ins.)

So, the plug-ins:

GRM BandPass

A very severe bandpass-bandreject filter which is good for futzing, telephone and radio effect filtering.  It doesn’t have a selectable Q, meaning you can’t control the steepness of its curve at the ends of the band.  I ran a little test with some white noise and a spectral analyzer and the filter drops off at least 48 dB per octave, which is quite severe and lends a certain designy or artificial quality to the output, which may or may not be what you’re looking for.

The band-reject function might be useful for mastering sound effects or original recordings because it can act as a highly selective notch filter, to take out ground hum, buzz from lighting, etc.  For this purpose a major drawback of GRM BandPass is that it only has one band.

Running a wideband or noisy signal through GRM BandPass with a narrow bandwidth can give you a resonant and tuned sound, having a strong fundamental and musical signal but still maintaining some of complexity of the underlying noise, as in any kind subtractive synthesis.  Which brings us to…

GRM CombFilter

For a resonating filter with more parameters, we have the GRM CombFilter.  There are five comb filters in a bank, with individually-controlled resonance, root frequency and low pass filters.  Running a complex signal through these will leave you with strong fundamentals and overtones, and essentially the output is the input filtered through different kinds of simple resonators — the effect of playing your sound in a wine glass, or a mailing tube, or transducing your sound through a Blaster Beam.  This new version of the CombFilter now gives you an spectral FFT display.

Natural resonators are of much interest in sound design: the sound of the TIE fighters in Star Wars, for example, are cars on a freeway recorded through a vacuum cleaner tube.  A rigid tube, like a vacuum cleaner tube or woodwind instrument, is a natural resonator, a “waveguide,” that applies a sort of comb filtering, either to car bys or the chaotic windflow of a player’s breath, by amplifying the wavelengths that are multiples of its length.  This aspect of the CombFilter is closely related to the the GRM Reson plug-in, which can model more complex resonances.

The GRM CombFilter filters ring, which is something that we usually don’t find desirable in a normal EQ but in this case gives us interesting creative possibilities.  By “ringing,”  we mean that the filters feed back into themselves in such a way that they’ll still output signal even after the original source has gone away.  Hitting the CombFilter with an impulse, a snap, will give you a tonal ringoff.

GRM Contrast

GRM Contrast is the only specifically dynamic plugin, pertaining to compression or expansion, in the complete GRM package, and, typically for a GRM plug-in, it takes a spectral approach to dynamic range manipulation.

GRM Contrast essentially puts a compressor-expander on every band in an original sound.  It listens to each band, and splits the bands of the spectrum into “strong,” “moderate,” and “weak,” depending on how much signal is on that band, and it either expands or compresses the signal on the band according to this, based on the user’s input.  You can see how this works by running a triangle wave through Contrast and watching what it does to the individual harmonics.

A triangle wave’s spectrum in the GRM Contrast plugin

Adjusting the “S” parameter will mostly just affect the volume of the fundamental and its first overtone, the strongest signals in the spectrum; adjusting the “M” has some effect on the fundamental but mostly controls the first overtone, the second-strongest signal; and the “W” knob will accentuate or cut the 5th harmonics on up, the weakest signals in the spectrum.

It’s difficult to objectively describe the effect of this, but by twiddling the knobs you can take an old mastered recording and significantly “open up” the dynamic range and subjective “space” of the sound.  Sloppy rumbling bass can be diminished relative to articulated sounds in the high strings and woodwinds, and certain kinds of noise can be attenuated.  It’s not a very effective de-noiser, at least compared to iZotope or Cedar, it seems to do a much better job when the various S/M/W profiles in the spectrum are tonal.  I also wouldn’t expect much from this plug-in on simple, transient sounds or single sources, like voices, it’s meant to work on premixed, complex, full programs of many parts.

GRM Delays

GRM Delays gives you a cluster or ensemble of digital delays.  These can have either very, very short delay lengths, in the tens of miliseconds, giving you a very digital comb-filtery effect, like Agent Smith dying in “The Matrix” or a de-rez in “TRON,” or quite a bit longer, giving you a more echoing effect, like a simple, non-convolution digital reverb.

The plugin provides a “random delay” setting which will randomly shuffle the delay lengths you have at whatever rate you set for “var rate.”  This can be used with the “feedback” in order to create a quick reverb that mimics a large space with hard, long echoes, like a stadium or city rooftop.

You can also control the distribution of the delay times and gains, such that a majority of the delays end later than sooner.  This combined with feedback and the random setting can be used to create sample clouds from an original sound, smearing the original over a large span of time and significantly suppressing the dry signal, while still maintaining the sort of clarity and timbre reverb tends to wash out.

Click here to view the embedded video.

GRM Doppler

GRM Doppler has always been my first choice for adding doppler shift to sound effects.  The plug-in gives you an X-Y control, so you can pan along with adding amplitude and pitch doppler effects to your sound.  For my own part, in my experience you have to experiment with the “doppler variation” setting and use a rather low value, like 30%, to obtain something realistic for most subjects.  Also, you should generally avoid manually dragging the X-Y controller in order to make a pass sound, this always sounds too jerky to me: just click from corner to corner of the X-Y window, and let the “following time” parameter do the work of moving the source, which will give you a move that’s much more consistent and realistic-sounding.

GRM Doppler is also a pretty good all-around modulation plugin if you’re stuck and don’t have a dedicated LFO modulation plugin like MondoMod.  Just use the circle amplitude and frequency, and instant AM and FM!

GRM Equalize

GRM Equalize is a typical 31-band graphic equalizer.  Very straightforward, however it has a special feature that isn’t completely obvious.  If you control-click on the plug-in and control-drag left and right, you’ll shift all of the band levels up and down the filter set.

Click here to view the embedded video.

(As a matter of fact, it’s not remotely obvious, I had to read it in the manual.)

GRM Evolution

GRM Evolution is one of the new “Evolution” plug-ins, and it produces some crazy sounds, but it’s a bit mystifying and I’m still trying to figure out uses for it.

The idea of evolution is that is listens to the input and outputs a spectral “integration” or “interpolation” thereof.  You feed it a signal with a changing spectrum, it averages out an interval of it, like say the last three seconds, and emits a spectrum that smears together the spectrum of the last three seconds.  Another three second go by, it analyzes, and the plug-in drifts its output to the new spectrum.  The plug-in also has pitch and transposition controls to warp the pitch of the output.

One the one hand I think Evolution has too many knobs, but they all do something.  After the gain control, the signal passes through a spectral analysis, and the plug-in lets you choose how many bands the analysis bins the signal into.  The more bands, the more complex a spectrum the plug-in will capture, but the delay of the plug-in increases (the sample delay of the plug-in is always the number of bands times two).  ”Speed” controls how much time is sampled to create a new spectrum and how long it holds it. “Purity” weeds out quieter components of the captured spectrum: as you turn it up, the output of the plug-in contains fewer and fewer overtones and becomes more glassy.  ”Grain” adds random frequency and gain variations to the output spectrum, which noises-up the output a bit, but above 4096 bands or so you won’t really hear it working.

Evolution doesn’t have to capture a new spectrum on a set interval.  If you set it to “one shot” mode, it’ll capture a spectrum every time you click “sample,” transition the output to the captured spectrum and hold it indefinitely.

The output tends to always have a ghostly and strange quality, so this plug-in would seem to apply to ambient sounds and design beds, but what plug-in doesn’t?  I had some luck using it as a sort of dynamic dream-sequence distorter for dialogue; as you stretch the time out whatever word you’re on stretches longer and longer; as a time distortion effect it’s very promising.

Edit: There is a demo video of GRM Evolution doing its thing on the INA-GRM site.

GRM Freeze

GRM Freeze is for people who wish they had a plug-in that worked exactly like the wave editor in their old hardware sampler.  GRM Freeze is able to capture about 10 seconds worth of audio, and then “freeze” it in a variable-length loop.  You can use this to repeat very short bits of a recording over a long space of time, maybe adding a little reverb to restore some reality; I’ve used it to create radio static from common household items recorded one-at-a-time, then using freeze to quickly shuffle back and forth between different transient sounds.

Freeze can run up to 128 different voices of the loop at the same time, all starting in their own spots and repeating at random, grabbing a bit of audio and clicking “Random Phases” will instantly give you a smooth stretching of the original sound.  Something I wish Freeze had is a setting for “Minimum Phase Distance” so that when you clicked “Random Phases,” you could control how close any two loops were in their starting position.  A problem with using a lot of loops to create a fill sound is that if any two of the loops start within 50 or fewer milliseconds of one another, you’ll start to hear autocorrelation between some of the loops (they play on top of each other) as phasing and frequency artifacts.

(To be continued with Part 2)

Welcome to the first of a series of posts dedicated to explore the whole Sound Design Suite of Waves. Apart of my own review, I’ll also include anecdotes, opinions, tips and tricks from professional sound designers that use these plugins everyday.

Today I’m going to talk about several tools designed for dynamics and frequency control, including the following:

• L1, L2, L3 and L3-LL
• C4
• H-Comp
• Linear Phase Multiband and Linear Phase EQ
• Q10

I know there are other special tools included in the suite that also work with dynamics and frequency processing, such as the Renaissance plugins, V-Series, and tools like Trans-X and DeEsser. Those will be discussed in future articles.

L1, L2, L3 and L3-LL

Let’s start with some of the most popular Waves plugins: L1, L2, L3 and L3-LL. They’re very simple but incredibly effective. These dynamics processors combine different processing technologies oriented to different tasks, including mastering, maximization, limiting, etc. L1 and L2 work in a pretty similar way. Both are based on three different technologies, including peak limiting, level maximization and a resolution re-quantizer (Waves IDR technology). L3 and L3-LL implement other technologies based on multiband dynamics processing, offering different algorithms.

In the sound design world, L1/L2/L3-LL have been used for years for maximization purposes: to get big, loud and crunchy sounds. They work in this way: Limitation is applied  when the signal passes above the threshold. The signal below it will be maximized, according to Threshold and Out Ceiling values. Then you can also control the release, which can be automatic in the L2, using the ARC feature. L1+, L2, L3 and L3-LL feature several controls for IDR, a proprietary dithering system used to re-quantize the processed material.

So, “what are is the difference between the three?” “What should I use?” As Scott Martin Gershin said about the L3, these tools add a “special something” to the sound. In the sound design world, I honestly can’t explain technically what’s the difference between the three of them. It’s something that you learn over the time of working with them. At least it worked in that way for me.

For this kind of tools, I personally recommend to not understanding them just in a technical way, but also keep in mind what are the characteristics that these tools are giving to your sounds. In other words: you don’t only need to understand threshold and out-ceiling values to learn how to use these plugins. That’s the “easy” part. What I’d recommend you is to identify the sonic characteristics of those plugins (ie: Does it adds coloration to a signal? Does it more effective with a certain kind of content? Does it add destruction? Does it make the sound softer?).

In a sound design context, we constantly refer to sound effects using all kind of adjectives, such as “agressive”, “fat”, “punchy”, “resonant”, etc. If you start to identify your plugins in a similar way, you could find the sound/process you need more quickly and even better. It’s a simple but effective rule: first think about the flavor you need and then choose the ingredient.

With the L-series is the same thing. All these maximizers have almost the same controls, so those sonic qualities are what makes you choose between one or another. If I would have to simplify the uses of these tools in a sound effects design context -from my short experience and also from the opinions of the masters- I’d say:

• If you need crunch, go with L1.
• If you don’t want that heavy crunch, but need maximization, go with the L2.
• If you want other results, try with L3/L3-LL. I personally don’t use these too much. Notice that these have a different approach and their sound depends on the multiband behavior.

“One of my favorite plugins. You can use it from anything as a final limiter to crunching your sounds to the max. One tip to try is to route two L1s together, one set to very light limiting, and one that crunches the sound to the max, and then balancing accordingly. Also, play with the release. Short releases create more distortion; longer releases smoothen out the sound” – Charles Deenen on L1.

“A great limiter for different situations. I mostly use it in the output if I design single sound effects on single tracks or the master output. It sounds clear and tight, a bit cold probably which is why I don’t like it too much on whole mixing applications.” – Axel Rohrbach on L1.

“Similar to the L1, but safer to use on variable sounds due to the automatic release setting. It also will introduce less “crunch”, so if you’re just after smashing the loudness of a sound without additional crunch, this is your go-to plugin. It’s so easy to use in comparison to some other limiters. Set the amount of dB you want it louder and forget about it.” - Charles Deenen on L2.

“L2 is not the better L1 – it really sounds different. It is softer and somehow “nicer” – which is meant absolutely neutral, since I don’t always want things to sound “nice”.” - Axel Rohrbach on L2.

C4

This one is a big machine. I think it’s one of the most versatile of the dynamic processors included in the suite. C4 can help you on equalization, compression, limiting or expanding, can help you mastering, can give you control over single sounds or layers, and can even reduce noise of your field recordings. It just do almost anything you want.

This plugin is a multiband compressor which takes features from other effects and technologies. It allows you to control de dynamics of four different bands, giving you total control of each. If you already understand how a compressor work, then C4 will not very difficult for you. There are some differences that you’ll find in the road, such as the range control (similar to the Ratio you can find on classic compressors), the global controls, and others. Not a big deal though.

The GUI and control system is pretty good and the graphic section makes things even more fun. I personally love this section for its flexibility and great capabilities. You can manipulate and visualize a lot of things in a beautiful way, combining the style of a parametric equalizer and a compressor. This section is also great for visualizing and metering, giving different colors and lines for real time visual analysis.

If you need total control and lots of options in a powerful dynamics processor, you may want to try C4.

“Great for de-noising some sounds (using the multi-band gating functions), and awesome to “level” out frequencies on recordings (if you don’t mind them being compressed).” – Charles Deenen

“The C4 lives up to its name: It’s explosive! (Sorry, couldn’t resist that bad joke.) I’m a big fan of C4 especially as a multiband noise reducer. It’s used in a lot of dialogue sessions on the films I work on – an integral part of the cleanup processing chain. I’m also using it for voiceovers quite often as a compressor. The layout makes it easy to do adjustments and if a voiceover is cut up from several different recording sessions the C4 also comes in handy when making them more smooth and even. Recommended. ” – Peter Albrechtsen

“I use C4 for so many things, to help shape sounds dynamically. I like to use it as a broad-stroke threshold-based EQ, to contain 3kHz to 5kHz transients while expanding low end frequencies, or to control the area around 400Hz to clear up a design when summing numerous elements”. – Scott Martin Gershin

H-Comp

Let’s talk about H-Comp, one of the most flexible and  virtual compressors I’ve ever worked with. It was developed using top notch modern and analog-modeling technologies, combined into an amazing hybrid processor.

It takes features of different analog components, such as transistors, tubes and transformers and combine them to give you a fantastic compressor full of color and control. It also has control over the signal transients, which comes very handy for sound design, specially on hard effects.

Think about thins like stingers, guns, explosions, all kind of impacts, fight sound effects, etc. H-Comp can give you a lot of body and punch to any sound. Taking this guy to the limit can be incredible on your designs. Let’s try with fast attacks, extreme punches and different analog character. You’ll be surprised of the great potential of this plugin.

After running the guns through a Waves doubler with three voices pitched down slightly and H-Comp set to squash the heck out of it, I started to feel that it was no longer a gun or even a really BIG gun. I proceeded to add some RenBass and a whole ton of L2 limiting. The next thing I knew I had what is very close to an explosion sound. I messed around with a few of the settings on the plug ins and it really started to get big. H-Comp was instrumental in getting the sound fat. I really over squashed it and eventually pulled back on it some because the background noise and hiss was starting to get noticeable. I added some C4 high frequency noise reduction and expansion and it came out well. – Frank Bry on designing explosions.

Linear Phase Multiband and Linear Phase EQ

Linear Phase Multiband is a multiband compressor based on C4 but loaded with more innovations focused on getting a more puristic sound. You may want to use it mostly on sound effects mastering (if you like to add dynamics processing to it of course). This plugin will give you a lot of flexibility along with clean results. I still prefer using C4 most of the time. It’s simpler, easier and has something special that I love.

Linear Phase EQ features the same technology behind Linear Phase Multiband, but as a clean and fantastic equalizer, oriented to clean and detailed equalization tasks. This equalizer was created mostly for mastering tasks, so its clean behavior can be really helpful on treating your field recordings. An example:

“After recording on location, I like to use the LinEQ to master my recordings before I use them in the editing process. It allows me to clean up the sound surgically, without adding any color, just getting rid of those frequencies that I know I won’t need later.” – Scott Martin Gershin

Q10

Q10 is one of my favorite equalizers. Light, flexible and very easy to use. You can load it as one band filter (Q1) or as a powerful 10 band paragraphic equalizer (Q10), featuring 1 to 10 bands of processing.

Each of these bands offers common parametric controls (type of filter, gain, frequency and Q) with different types of filters and quite flexible range of operation. This EQ can be useful for a lot of tasks including both extreme and subtle tonal changes, filtering, surgical tasks, noise reduction, etc. It’s just a fantastic. Also, in the recent V8 update it comes with a new look that makes it even more intuitive and easy to use.

“Q10 has a neat little secret weapon buried down in the preset menu. If you click on the “load” button a list of presets will pop up and near the bottom you’ll find ones for “AM Radio” and one for “Telephone”. These are great for quick and dirty processing to create phone conversations or playing music or dialog as though it were coming out of a radio speaker. I used these to create some answering machine voice effects in another episode of “Fringe”.” – Bruce Tanis

Bob Bridgett has published a new fantastic article at Gamasutra, this time exploring common examples of dynamics from horror cinema and how those rules can be adapted to game design and game audio in any genre through graphic visualisation and planning techniques.

‘Design’ is one of the most important areas of sound design, in that the sound designer needs to sit down, over the course of many planning meetings, with game designers and plot out and map the intended experience from start to finish.

This is done via each and every mission and cinematic and decide where the game needs to deliver the biggest impact, both from a macro-cosmic level for the entire game, and potentially a microcosmic level for each mission stage. This is, in effect, designing the dynamic range of the game experience and mapping where audio will follow that curve or any areas where audio needs to play against that curve.

Audio clearly needs to be involved in this planning process as music, sound and dialogue are some of the more potent tools for delivering subtlety and intensity in a game. This process is one of the many aspects of sound design that doesn’t involve sitting in a studio designing sound effects and tuning game audio, it is potentially the most important to the integrity of the whole soundtrack, as it will dictate where music, fx and dialogue all need to work together with the game flow.

Read the article here.