I was born in England in 1988. Some of my earliest memories involve old BBC and Mac computers. I grew up listening to CDs, MiniDisks, playing "Duck Hunt" on my sister's NES. The dial-up modem sounds are imprinted on my memory. I recall my father ordering books from Amazon.com back when that's all Amazon sold. In my teen years I assembled my own computer to save money and grew … [Read more...]
Combating Noise in Plug-in Chains
This article is going to be a little less template, and a little more workflow. We all have our favorite plug-ins. We probably also all have plug-ins we'd love to use, but run into limitations that keep us from pulling them out of the tool box. For instance, I have a couple of plug-ins from Waves that can add some really cool sonic character when I'm designing a sound, but also … [Read more...]
Public Service Announcement Regarding iLok
In case you haven't seen the information burning its way across social media yet, there have been some issues with the latest updates to the iLok system. While they're adding some very useful features in a new downloadable "client" program, they've hit some unexpected stumbling blocks on the back-end. At some point over the weekend, they updated their databases to work with the … [Read more...]
Compressor Gain Control Principles
Herbert Goldberg has an interesting article up about compressors and the though process behind designing their inner workings. That fits nicely into this month's theme, don't you think? Technically speaking the same principles are used in audio signal limiting and compression processors but just the transfer curves and envelope follower settings are different. Ultra fast … [Read more...]
Thanks to our January Contributors
We'd like to thank our guest contributors for January's plug-in features: Charles Maynes for sharing his genius matrix idea Frank Bry for exploring the colorations that transient shapers can offer Tom Todia for presenting a way to create lots of sound variants extremely quickly The Tonebenders (Timothy Muirhead, René Coronado and Dustin Camilleri) for sharing some of their … [Read more...]
Review – Blue Cat Audio “Multi Pack”
While this month has thus far been dedicated to plug-ins and their direct application to sound design, it's important to remember that there are also tools that help us make decisions in the sound design process. To that end, here's a review of Blue Cat Audio's "Multi Pack." The Multi Pack is a set of three analysis plug-ins: FreqAnalyst Multi, StereScope Multi and … [Read more...]
I Love Plug-ins!
Guest Contribution by Tom Todia I love Plug-Ins! There, I feel much better now. Since January is the month of the plug-in here at Designing Sound, I thought this was a great opportunity to share one of my new favorites with you. This plug-in does exactly what its name states but it has a twist that I absolutely love. If you have not yet used it then allow me to introduce … [Read more...]