Monthly Archive for May, 2009

Well there are 4 great free plug-ins that I have found useful in my every day work in audio post production.

Do you know and use any other ones?

If you do why don’t you tell us about them by commenting to this post.

A few guidelines…

• They must be Pro Tools plug-ins
• They should be native to Pro Tools like RTAS or TDM rather than VST
• They should be useful in an audio post environment rather than a music environment.

Thanks.

This is a dynamic processor that apparently manages audio transients. As with all Flux plug-ins it features 64 bit floating point processing, for up to 8 channels. Centre and Stereo Modes are only available in stereo (2 channels) processing.

According to Flux, turning the central button on the sweet side, decreases the transients amplitude. On the bitter side, the transients amplitude is magnified. Bitter-Sweet also features a control to determine which elements of the signal are to be processed. In the main position, the process affects the entire stereo signal. In the Centre position, only the M signal of the internal MS matrix is processed. When Stereo is selected, only the S signal from the MS matrix is processed.

Comments
I have to admit I was sceptical at what this plug-in would do. So I first tried it on a solo vocal and I found that reasonable amounts of Bitter brought some life back into the vocal. Be careful not to over do it or all the starts of words and phrasing can jump out at you. Next I tried it on the piano track and the Sweet side didn’t have a huge effect but the Bitter side just seemed to emphasis the attack of the notes and made that particular piano sound very clunky. I followed this with a look at a bass track and medium amounts of Bitter increased the attack of the bass giving it some more ‘cut’ on the track. Conversely the Sweet side smoothed out the attack on the notes and produced a smoother sounding bass sound. Finally I turned to an acoustic guitar track. There is a track on an album that has a classical guitar which I miced with an MS pair but had to mic quite closely as there was a strings section playing in the room as well. When it came to the mix we wanted to get some sense of distance and my normal route is to use Waves Trueverb ‘inline’ and use the distance control to get that sense of distance but on this occasion it wasn’t working as well as I would like. Adding the Bitter-Sweet to it and turning it fully over to the Sweet side allowed me to back off the Truverb quite a lot and has improved the sense of space and distance I was looking for.

Flux have designed this free plug-in to offer “super precise control of the stereo image”.

Stereo Tool offers controls for the input gain and individual pan for left and right channels, as well as a phase inversion switch on both channels.

Add to those individual controls a global stereo pan and stereo width controls and they have provided an excellent range of controls to make the correct adjustment to a stereo channel.

But that isn’t all; on the metering side they have provided a stereo audio ‘scope’ and PPM meters on both inputs and outputs as well as a phase correlation meter.

This will be a great tool for fixing a wide range of stereo problems as well as being able to use it creatively to position stereo tracks effectively in the stereo image on a mix.

I have found in the past that having either individual pan control or a single balance control doesn’t enable me to position some sounds as I would like in a mix and when I have needed to correct a stereo track I haven’t had the right tool to get it the way I wanted it. Now with this free plug-in Flux have included all three types of stereo positioning controls, pan balance and width, as well as individual channel gain controls. Add to that a comprehensive metering section and this plug-in will be an excellent addition to my toolbox ad free too!