Nov 13, 2023
WAVES director of training and develpment Michael Pearson Adams (Gomez to his Aussie mates) joins us in part 1 of a chat about plugins for Voice Actors.
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“When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional.”
Hunter S Thompson
Summary
In this episode of the Pro Audio Suite, we introduce our special
guest MPA, also known as Gomez from Waves. We deep dive into the
realm of audio plugins, focusing on user-friendly options for the
less technically inclined. Gomez explains how these streamlined
plugins can simplify tasks, such as noise reduction and reverb
clean-up, in audio recordings. However, the debate ensues on the
importance of pre-recording room preparations and the potential
overuse of reduction plugins. The discussion also touches on the
advancements in AI technology for handling audio issues, the
concept of "best edit," and the niche specificities of various
plugins like Clarity DXD Reverb and Dereverb Pro. Use code Trip200
to get $200 off your Tribooth.
#AudioEngineeringSimplified #ProPluginInsights
#KeepingItSimple
Timestamps
(00:00:00) Introduction with George Wittam and Robert Marshall
(00:00:38) Discussing Noise Reduction Plugins with MPA Gomez
(00:08:38) Mastering Extreme Editing
(00:15:50) The Art of Invisible Editing
(00:16:48) Exploring Plugin Niches
Transcript
Speaker A: Y'all ready? Be history.,Speaker B: Get started.,Speaker
C: Welcome.,Speaker B: Hi. Hi. Hello, everyone to the pro audio
suite.,: These guys are professional.,Speaker C: They're motivated
with tech. To the VO stars, George Wittam, founder of Source
Elements Robert Marshall, international audio engineer Darren Robbo
Robertson and global voice Andrew Peters. Thanks to Triboo,
Austrian audio making passion heard source elements George the tech
Wittam and Robbo and AP's international demo. To find out more
about us, check ThePro Audiosuite.com line up.,Speaker B: Learner.
Here we go.,: And don't forget the code. Trip 200 to get $200 off
your Tribooth. Now, we have a special guest today, MPA, known to us
as Gomez from waves, is here to talk about some simple, let's put
it this way, plugins for people like myself. A simpleton when it
comes to audio engine. Simple people. Exactly.,: Right brain,
folks. Right brain. Not simple, just right brain.,: Yes,
exactly.,Speaker A: And I guess that's where the premise for this
episode came from, really, was about keeping it simple. Because I
was reading a Facebook post from a guy who was proclaiming the fact
that he'd sort of been doing a session in a hotel room and hadn't
bothered to build the pillow fort or do anything to negate the
sound of the room, and then recorded his session and then used some
sort of noise reduction plugin, like clarity, like whatever, like
RX, to clean it up. And my first thought was, well, you're making
the plugin work harder than it needs to, and that means that you're
going to end up with artifacts in the audio that you want to keep
because you've got this thing working so hard. Whereas I would
prefer to hear, as an engineer, I would prefer to hear that you've
done what you can to negate the room and then used a noise
reduction plugin. If you feel it is absolutely necessary to just
clean up what little artifacts are left, because there's less
chance of that doing any sort of damage to the audio that I want to
use. But then also, for voiceover artists and people who aren't
techie, the words ratio attack time release time threshold mean
nothing. So how do you use these plugins? And I guess the reason
for getting you on, Michael, was to sort of, you know, what can
they do?,: The thing with Pillowforts, from a pro point of view,
and an advisory point of view, is people can actually go way over
the top with those to the point that it degrades the sound more is
not better. And I say the same thing to somebody. It's like when
I'm advising them. And they say, well, we've been recording the
voiceovers in the clothes closet. And I'm like, okay. And the
result, they're like, well, it sounds really muffled and horrible
and dead. There's no higher or mid or high frequencies. And I'm
like, okay, so the first thing I want you to tell me is, is that
cupboard filled with coats? If it's filled with things like coats
and nothing else, then you're basically killing your sound. If it's
filled with things, that is a variety of different kinds of cloth
and material, you've got a much better chance of it just stopping
audio dead rather than absorbing it. You don't want everything
absorbed. You want it not bouncing around the room. The other one
that I always love is when somebody goes, yeah, well, I put pillows
and stuff around me. And I said, well, where in the room are you?
This is next to the window. I said, you mean that floor to ceiling
window in most hotels? Yeah, that's the one. It's a beautiful view.
I wanted to see the view. It's like, well, the view is killing.,:
You right now, bouncing off the window.,: Yeah. So there are
varying levels of problem that need to be looked at. And that's
literally one of the first things that we do when we're helping
somebody is go, not only tell me that, yes, you're doing a pillow
for this, I want to know what kind of clothes are in those closet.
Not in a creepy way, but are we talking heavy winter coats? Are we
talking big felt coats? Are we talking dresses, jeans? What are we
talking about? How high?,: But at some point, do you solve the
problem acoustically so much that you don't need a waves product?
Or at what point is it like, okay, well, I can't actually bring in,
or maybe I don't even want to go through the extent of flipping the
mattress up on its side to put it along a wall.,: Flipping a
mattress, as far as I'm concerned, just says more like you're
worried about an assassin. So nearly every single masterclass I do
with my waves hat on, I spend as much time telling people about the
fact that I want you to use as few plugins as you possibly can to
making sure that you're just not overdoing things. And it's one of
the biggest problems is that people throw plugins on with way too
much kind of ease and breeze without actually really thinking about
it sometimes. And that also degrades. So you have to really decide,
is this plugin going to fix something? Or am I just putting it on
because I've heard it helps.,: You don't hear it helps, but you
heard it helps.,Speaker A: Yeah. But the other thing is, too,
Gomez, is that you should exhaust all your options in terms of
getting a clean recording before you even put a plug in.,Speaker B:
Yeah.,: Right.,Speaker A: To just open up the mic in the middle of
the room and then go, oh, well, I'll just chuck a plugin on. In
some cases, you're going to have to work that plugin so hard to get
it cleaned up that it's to the detriment of the audio. Whereas if
you've done everything, you.,: Absolutely.,Speaker A: And then you
only need a tiny bit of plugin to get that tiny last few artifacts
out of there, then that's a much better way of approaching
it.,Speaker B: Right.,: There's also the positioning in a locality,
too, of your face and your mouth to the microphone, even when
you're in a. You know, if you're. If you're in a room that's really
kind of echoey, entirely like a normal hotel room or anything
that's got wooden floors, like this room, for example. I have no
plugins on this because I didn't have time to put any on. But the
simple reality is the closer you get to the microphone, the more
chance that you've got of mitigating some of those issues without
putting anything on it at all, and then you've got more of a chance
of, okay, so what do I need to put on here? Clarity VXD Reverb or
clarity XVX D Reverb Pro are definitely plugins that I wave a flag
for the amount of effort, the amount of years, and the amount of
time that we put into them. And people shouldn't buy them or try
them just because somebody said years. There's just as many things
out there that sound amazing, that somebody created in a month. But
we did that. There's so many samples that we fed into this AI, like
hundreds of thousands. And because of that, the result is it really
works. But again, like any plugin, you can't overdo it. So my best
suggestion with a plugin like Clarity VX de Reverb in a hotel room
or an office or somewhere where you are, that is not your ideal
place, or the place that you know is take it all the way to the
extreme and then pull it back.,: Just a quick question for you. So
if I was in a position where I couldn't actually manage the room
that well, I've done everything I possibly can to control whatever
artifacts, particularly reverb in a hotel room or whatever. If I
use clarity VX de Reverb, is it destructive? So when I'm sending
the file off to an engineer, can they?,: That depends on your
routing. What platform are you using it in? How would you be
setting it up?,: Well, I'm just saying if I give it too much, is it
going to.,Speaker A: Do damage to the audio? Yes, it will do damage
to the audio. Like anything over compressed, over noise reduction,
overuse of noise reduction. You can even over EQ. Really?,: Yeah,
definitely.,Speaker A: Anything like that because you're fucking
with the audio. So you're changing the audio. Yes. It's, as Gomez
said, hundreds of thousands of samples. But if you make it work too
hard, it's got no choice but to start eating into the audio you
want to keep. I would presume Gomez is.,: Oh, absolutely,
absolutely. Which is why I say take it all the way to the extreme
and then work your way back.,: Yeah.,: And by the way, I give that
advice for pretty much every plugin. It's like if you really want
to know how to use subtracted EQ, go to the extreme and then move
your way back. Same with compression and everything else, but with
something like an aipowered de rumor, which is effectively what
clarity DXD Reverb is. It cleans up the noise and the reverb in the
room. You are going to get to a point where you're basically
saying, okay, I've taken it out of automatic mode and I'm just
going to get what it gives me on extreme and it's going to kill
your audio file. However, I will tell you that it's very hard to do
that in clarity. Any of the clarity plugins, because way back when
we released vocal rider. Remember vocal rider?,Speaker A: I use
vocal rider all the time.,: Okay, so Vocal rider was one of the
first plugins that we ever designed and developed that was focused
specifically on identifying the frequency range and spectrum of a
human voice. So if you put vocal rider on like a drum, it's not
going to work as well as a human voice. It's not even going to know
what to do with it. You put it on a guitar, same deal. It's not
going to know what to do with it. This is also why we then released
bass rider. And then we focused that on the spectrum and
frequencies for bass. Now, going back to vocal rider, that was our
first jump into that field of, okay, so we want this to only
understand what's going on with the human voice. Now, let's move
forward to 2021, 2022, when we released Clarity VX this is very
much designed around the human voice, and we've actually created it
in such a way that it's hard to really mess it up. But depending on
how much noise you've got and how bad the room is, especially on
the pro version of the plugin, where there's more to tweak. Yeah.
You can over dig yourself into a hole with the simple one with just
a big knob in the middle and a couple of small switches. It's
really hard to mess it up.,: Can I ask you, when does it go from
being reverb to being resonance? Or maybe early reflections? Right.
Because there's a certain point where Reverb is the artifacts or
the room itself. When it gets to a certain size, maybe less than, I
don't know, six by 8ft or something, reverb no longer is the same
problem anymore. Now you're dealing with, like, pressure zones and
early reflections. Are we getting to the point yet with AI where we
can start actually dealing with that stuff too? Because you sound
like you're in a tube. You sound like you're in a box problem. Are
we getting to the point where we can fix that too?,: I figured
that's part of the room, part of the reverb.,: It is part of the
room. And dereverb it totally is. We can fix that.,: That's
awesome.,: Yeah.,: Because that's much more complex than just a
reverb tail.,: Well, that's always been the problem. Most other,
there's been various de reverb plugins out there. And to be honest,
what I used to use before clarity came out with a dereverb is you
just take a waves C four and you put it all the way on expand, and
you can tweak each frequency band and you can kind of sit on the
tail. And none of the other products out there could get rid of the
early reflections, which were really the telltale sign of you being
in a small space, right? Essentially, yeah.,: There's a lot you
could do with clarity VX, just the noise fixing plugins. But with
de Reverb, we went all the way. And it's down to the little nuances
of reflections as well as the big tails and everything else. It's
like we want to make you sound like you're in a room that has no
reflections. And that's one of the reasons why one of the controls
you have is basically controlling the presence of the plugin. And
it kind of takes your voice and makes sure that you're telling the
plugin. Okay. So now that we've cleaned up that noise. I want you
to take my voice and focus more exactly on that. And then the
plugin will go, okay, right, so now you're in a cleaner room and
you've got the ability to take your voice and put it right out
front. So the other thing that you can do is you can basically
choose which neural network you want to use. So if you're doing
spoken voice, pick one for spoken voice. If you're singing, then
use that neural network. You can choose whether you want stereo or
whether you want mono. So if it's just a voiceover and that's it,
then you can actually tell it, okay, I'm just dealing with mono
single here. And it's going to work in a different way, but it will
clean it up really nicely for you.,: It's funny, though, because it
is quite subjective. Because I do remember I was away in April, and
I obviously had to work while I was away in some pretty weird
environments. And I sent a file to Robert. And I sent the same
file. In fact, I think I sent it to all three of you, George and
Robbo. I got feedback from Robbo and I said, would you use that? He
said, yeah, I'd use that. And I got one back from Robert saying I
wouldn't be happy if I received that. So to me, that is a sign of
the whole thing being a bit subjective as well. Some people have no
problem with it, and some people have a major problem with.,Speaker
A: Audio is subjective, I guess, in its own, in and of itself.
Audio is subjective, I suppose.,: Yeah. But the question, of
course, is. So if that's the case, would I use it for Robo? No.
Would I use it for Robert? Probably.,: It also depends on your
listening environment. I mean, I can tell you that if I'm listening
to something in this room, in this home studio, through my
speakers, then it's going to sound different to if I'm in British
Columbia at EA Sports in their mastering studio, and the same
voiceover would sound probably completely different because they're
listening to. There I'd be listening through PMCs, and here I'm
listening through Adams.,: They're in a very expensive room, I
would guess.,: Yeah. EA Sports has, I think, about 28 rooms right
now.,: I heard the video game industry is doing okay. Like there's
a budget these days.,: Their audio rooms are insane. You know, when
a company like EA Sports stops calling itself a headquarters and
calls itself a campus.,Speaker A: Welcome to the Voodoo Sound
campus. Can I just say too, by the.,: Way.,: Campus is a
road.,Speaker A: Yeah, campus is a row of tense. Let's have a look
at something else. Speaking of games, say I'm a voiceover artist
and I've just finished recording an hour or so of gaming voiceover
and I look at the file and I think, oh, shit, that's a little
dynamic. And for whatever reason, God knows why, but I feel like I
should put some compression on it. But the word ratio to mean means
nothing and attack and release time. What's a good one for that?,:
Something really transparent and relatively hard to screw it up too
badly.,: Yeah, well, everything. You want everything to be the best
edit that you never heard. If somebody is listening to something
and going, oh, there's a plugin on that, then you failed. It's as
simple as that. So the term the best edit I never heard is one of
my favorites.,Speaker A: I use it all the time. I stole it off.,:
You did, didn't you? Yeah, I did, yeah. So now that I've said that,
I forgot what you asked Rob.,Speaker A: So something like, I mean,
my thought would be Avox, but you guys also have all the one Knob
series and all that sort of stuff for someone, a compressor in the
hands of somebody who knows nothing about what they're doing but
needs to put a tiny bit of compression on something.,: What's a
good one in that case? Yes. Rvox. So in studio rack I have a chain
that I save and it's just my voiceover chain for this specific
microphone. And the first plugin on it is clarity VX de reverb. The
second one is Avox and the third one is one knob brighter.,Speaker
A: Such a good plugin.,: Which one, sorry, let me say it in
another.,Speaker A: Move back to Australia.,: There you go, one
knob brighter.,: Brighter.,Speaker A: One knob brighter is such a
good plugin and I think we've talked about this before, but Slate
digital do a similar one, fresh air, but they're both equally good
and I guess, I suppose, like clarity and all the other noise
reduction plugins, each seems to have their own sort of niche that
they work best in, I suppose. I think one knob brighter on voice is
awesome, but Fresh air on it across a mix for me, just gives it
that little extra bit of sheen.,: Oh, absolutely. And fresh air is.
I nearly look at fresh air as something that's more comparative to
something from us that would not be anything to do with restoration
or eqing of any kind. There's a plugin which I'm trying to remember
the name of and good God, I can't remember it for my life now, but
it lets you adjust the width of each of your frequency groups, like
low, mid high, mid high, lets you monitor them or stereo them. And
I embarrassed that the product name has gone out of my head. But
yeah, that's the one that I usually compare more to, to the air one
from those guys.,: When do you make the leaps from clarity VXD
Reverb to dereverb Pro?,: Realistically, if you're not producing
the audio yourself, then from my perspective, clarity DXD Reverb is
totally good for you. That's kind of what you need, right? Yeah.
If, however, you are taking on and you're doing post production and
you're dealing with everything that's coming in from multiple
voices, multiple places, and you've got a multi track in front of
you and you're dealing with that on a day to day basis, then that's
when pro comes in because that's where you have the ability to
control the tail more so you can smooth out the tail. You've got
independent knob rather than just a simple fader for presence.
You've got something that we call a strength multiplier. You've got
the ability to go into every single part of the frequencies and
choose which ones you really want the plugin working on and which
ones you don't.,: Is that that EQ curve looking thing across the
middle?,: That's the one of the graph? Yeah. The one that says
strength and frequency.,: Right.,: So effectively that's exactly
it. To strengthen frequency, it's like, okay, rather than just a
knob, what we did was go, okay, right. So we're dealing this for
the seasoned post production guy or somebody of that ilk going,
okay, so this is where that room is. Let me focus all that and
bring out. I don't want much of the strength on that part, but I do
over here between three and eight K, it's very tweaky. Oh, it is.
Very now.,: But if you were trying to match, like, if you had five
different sources and you wanted them to sound like they're
literally in the same space, sounds like the level of tweakability
you would want to have.,: Absolutely. But if you're a voiceover or
you're somebody that's doing your own stuff and you're doing it, or
you're doing a podcast and you've got a guest coming in and they're
on their MacBook Pro microphone and they're sitting in a kitchen on
a tiled floor with a window behind them. And that's the kind of
thing where honestly, just use the normal one with the one big knob
in the middle. It's like a lot of plugins. You can get yourself
into a hole really quickly unless you've got the expertise to be
able to deal with it. Which is also why we released two versions of
these. One of them is a quick fix, and by Quick Fix, I do not mean
degraded quality at all. It's exactly the same neural engines, but
it gives you less tweakability so that there's less risk of you
messing it up yourself. And then you've got Pro, which has more
tweakability, plus a limiter built in, plus width control, plus
tail smoothing, plus the ability to get more neural networks and an
analysis of both mono and stereo. It gives you a lot.,: Yeah, that
was just part one of our chat with Michael Pearson Adams or Gomez,
if you like, from waves. We'll be back next week for a continuation
of this conversation, and we're also tapping into something which
is kind of topical as we age, because some of us are doing that.
We'll be talking about hearing loss and how best to manage it when
you do this for a living. So join us next week. More chats about
hearing, more chats about plugins, and more chats with Michael
Pearson Adams from Waves. See you next week.,Speaker B: Well, that
was fun. Is it over?,Speaker C: The Pro audio suite with thanks to
Tribut and Austria and audio recorded using Source Connect, edited
by Andrew Peters and mixed by Voodoo Radio Imaging with tech
support from George the tech Wittam. Don't forget to subscribe to
the show and join in the conversation on our Facebook group. To
leave a comment, suggest a topic, or just say g'day. Drop us a note
at our website, theproaudiosuite.com.