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Have anyone tried to recreate breakaway effect using VST's?
I wonder how can I do the same "enhancement" I hear in my speakers to happen in a live performance.
What is the right chain of effects? What are the best VST's to aproximately recreate Breakaway's enhancements? Specially the bassy "Regulator" preset with all levels in "50".
I tried using many different big brand compressors and multiband equalizers but it doesn't come close. I'm intrigued!
Broadcast audio processing, vs studio audio processing, is really the big difference that you're experiencing in trying to do that.
Broadcasters have the advantage of over 60 years of innovations in audio processing that the recording industry has almost completely ignored, while they stayed largely complacent.
One good example is…
1956 Gates STA-Level, the first compressor that has a "gate" to stop the compressor from adding additional gain when the input levels fall below a certain threshold. A "gated compressor". This innovation alone is something that is still to this day a BIG deal for a compressor to have, and almost completely non-existent even in the entire history of recording industry's master recordings. Finally within the last 10 years that compressor gained a nice cult following in the recording industry, and even appeared on a Jay-Z album cover a few years ago. Unfortunately not even that innovation itself has captured much of any interest from the recording industry.
On the other hand, they have eventually caught on to 1-2 other big innovations in broadcasting, such as…
1972ish Durrough DAP-310, the first multiband compressor. 3 bands mono box. This is an example of a very big innovation in broadcast audio processing that eventually (in the era of software plugins) finally did catch on. One of very few examples.
Unfortunately there's a thousand examples of the recording industry ignoring innovations, per example of them adopting another. Half of them are still semi-secret as well. Most broadcast audio processors have at least 2-3 secrets in em, some have over a hundred. "Special sauce" 🙂
A friend DJ once told me the same thing when we were discussing Howard Stern audio processing.
But I always look for a "setup", or a "preset", call it what you want, a "standard", a "profile", whatever! I just want to have THAT sound, more or less, no matter where I record or with what gear.
This is why I love Breakaway, because it gives me always "THAT" sound, no matter what computer or player I play a certain track.
But if you want this experience recorded, your only choice is to record your stereo mixer, like we did old style with tapes! 😀 Needless to say this is not viable for live broadcasting or mastering.But I think I am getting close:
In my searches, I found a VST called AMT Multi Max from NomadFactory. It comes really close to the sound of "Regulator" from B.A.E.
I'm currently fine tunning it. But I'm not that good yet, if someone wishes to try, please write here or upload your presets so I can try.My current problem is: If I enhance vocal clarity in MultiMax, it gets too warm for music. If I enhance the lower range for boominess in music, I get mud in vocal clarity. I know I have to chain it to other VST's, but I couldn't figure it yet!
— PS: I always do mixing with Breakaway disabled!
You could get a BreakawayOne HD core license, which is cleaner (artifacts) and not only supports 24-bit input/output, but more importantly is linear phase. That'll let you have audio coming in/out of any soundcard or virtual soundcard that you want.
That being said, as a mastering engineer of 20 years now… and being pretty involved in audio processing for as long… I'm actually not torn about using broadcast boxes for mastering at all. I would NEVER do it myself. Just like I'd never use a multiband slapped across the entire bandwidth of the recording on a mastering job. I always am going to try to get something to happen first with the least invasive and damaging method possible, which is linear phase EQ. Then I start to reach for other things.
The flip side of that coin is that my mastering can use a ton of things that I would NEVER want to use in any broadcast box, because of how potentially damaging it could be, and it's going to be … a long time before AI can even pretend it's making the same decisions that we are, creatively, when we're working on things. Especially if someone's not just trying to be a cookie cutter top 40 or metal or EDM engineer. 😉 or any other genre with so strong a pressure to conform, that there can eventually be a "box" that just spits out "that way it should sound" every time. 😉 And for that though…. is a broadcast box is working, and that's all someone is mastering, then who is anyone to argue. It's just not my experience personally.
dang, Nomad Factory need to work on their SEO… the first 30 results (on DuckDuckGo, not some search hole hell like Google) are cracks of the plugin, and home loan scams.
Update on my experiments:
First I recorded an audio, raw, with no modifications on the microphone or the soundcard mixer. As flat as my gear allows (BM800 condenser + Roland QuadCapture soundcard + Audacity)
Then I exported to high quality mp3, and played it in Foobar2000 to play it as flat as possible.
Then I recorded my stereomix in audacity again, but with B.A.E. enabled in Regulator mode.
Then I tried to use lots of Waves VSTs and Nomad Factory Multimax to emulate the same sound with a similar curve shape.
No success. B.A.E. is ridiculously hard to emulate properly!!!!
The closest I got was using a multiband compressor -> limiter -> amt multimax. But it got really "heavy" and dull. It lack the smooth dynamics of B.A.E.I have some questions to the pros here:
– Does B.A.E. use EQ?
– Does B.A.E. use the reverb enhancing trick or just SRS WOW?
– I saw a product called Isotope Ozone that has a "match" function to emulate other track curves. Does anyone here uses or used it and can confirm it works? (It's an expensive plugin!)PS: I could just keep recording my stereomix to get that pretty B.A.E. enhancement, but this type of recording belongs to the era of tapes! And I'd like to keep it in the past.
I need something more practical and faster, to figure the right plugins in the right chain and make a preset so I can automatically enhance any audio I want with a single click.I've given up! Whoever figured Breakaway is a mixing wizard!
I tried guide myself using these chains seen here to no avail. Maybe I lack proper plugins, I'm not the guy who owns 344 million VSTS, I like to pick a few good ones for my needs.
I'll consider BA1 once I can afford. Dollars for me are 4x more expensive :-\
Do I get full functionality with trial version? How much time can I test, what's the limit?[quote author=MasteringMaster link=topic=5736.msg20320#msg20320 date=1572395130]
Do I get full functionality with trial version? How much time can I test, what's the limit?
[/quote]Yes in trial version you get BAO with all the features you have with the paid version, only you hear about every half an hour/20 minutes a professional voice saying you are using a demo product.
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