Summing plugins, snake oil or useful?
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AP mastering intentionally says things he knows are false, for engagement. And you should take all his studies with a grain of salt. He is well aware that analog emulations aren't snake oil.
It's easy to answer your own question.
Just use an analyser. Stick in a sine wave and see what comes out when you drive the plugin hard.Same thing with drums. Get a transient drum loop and boost it super loud before you send it into the plugin.
You'll quickly see or hear anything that it does.
Make sure that your analyser is configured appropriately. Additionally, you can extract single cycles from the processed waveform and inspect them.
To take this further, you can create a hacked waveform in Python which contains every possible sample value. Feeding this into the vst will then reveal if it's a waveshaper (static nonlinearity) or if it's something more along the lines of a circuit simulation. You can derive the waveshape using a probe like this. If it's a waveshaper (eg tahn, or similar) the waveshaper curve will be revealed. If it's a circuit simulation (as are most good console sims) then you will get a mangled result.
Circuit simulation is really the only way to get a good summing emulation. And it's a deep rabbit hole. If you want details I'll give you the resources
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@griffinboy hit me!
https://instagram.com/morphoice - 80s inspired Synthwave Music, Arcade & Gameboy homebrew!
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Distortion is often low on summers, apart from certain brands. Some mixer circuits are truly very distorty though. Such as the ones found in analog synths for example. Old Mic preamps tend to be spicy too (tubes). Such as the Neve stuff, or Universal Amplifiers like the mcurdy au300 and such. These can give great colour to a sound and are far from transparent. It really has to be old gear if you want it to saturate. I'm talking 50s 60s, heavy hardwired stuff. It's not worth modelling a modern mixer, those mostly do not distort pleasantly, or at all, as you've found. Summing vsts are supposed to simulate the older type of technology, to give an alternative if the modern clean recording is not what is desired. This kind of vst is used to mix and master pop a lot. On vocals and bass.
Not sure if you were asking about how to create a mixer simulation or not but if so:
To create a circuit model of an amplifier / summing stack, you first need to be able to construct a digital circuit.Either using WDF (wave digital filters), State Space Modelling (matrices), or Modified Nodal Analysis. It's normal to start by constructing a simplified circuit that you derive from the full schematic. After you achieve the digital circuit, it's all about efficiency and accuracy. You need to find the best way to represent nonlinear components in both an accurate and efficient way.
Here are some of my favourite pieces of research on the matter. Some of these authors post code on github btw... Especially Jatin
Chowdhury-DSP
Chowdhury-DSP has 28 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub.
GitHub (github.com)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hF1yPIjr4c4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Auwf9z0k_7E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITjMLxzhVpQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_HHJdCKcjA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeS6wQJ6mYI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGcqomH6aAc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBxKUXiHzJI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHiMD_QGRo0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZxfv0euB98
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIChUOV_0w4 -
Awesome thanks! I've already consumed some of those, ChowDSP was my read when designing the tape wow thing. Essential! Also did some experiments with WDF in faust so I seem to be on the right track there.
I'll take a deep dive and see what I can come up with!
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@griffinboy said in Summing plugins, snake oil or useful?:
It's not worth modelling a modern mixer, those mostly do not distort pleasantly, or at all, as you've found.
Not sure how much I agree with this. Depending on what you call modern. Old 90's Mackie mixers were pretty famous for how crunchy and chunky they made everything sound, and they are pretty revered gear in the drum and bass and rave scenes.
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True.
Transistor mixers can be nice when pushed. But it's more like clipping, than saturation. Good for sound design / synthesis, but idk how useful it is as saturation. Maybe it's alright. People do use clippers after all. -
@Morphoice said in Summing plugins, snake oil or useful?:
I do have access to some consoles, but from what I can test-record and measure the differences in sound (unless you crank them to extremes) are so subtle, they are not even worth the CPU to algorithmically rebuild them, or am I on the wrong track here?
yes they are all very subtle when you test them in a single track - but thats not really how they are supposed to be used - its a cumulative effect - so every track in your DAW has your console plugin - so only in the master out do you hear any noticeable difference.
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@griffinboy I know that in rock and metal, clippers are used a lot for maximizing headroom and getting sounds to really pop in the final mix, without taking up all of the dynamic range. Particularly useful on snares, where you want it to really smack, but you don't want that initial transient to absorb all of the space. Some mastering engineers even deliberately clip their converters to impart a certain kind of tonality.
The way an SSL clips or saturates is a particularly reknowned sound as well. I just think that it probably is worth modelling these aspects, because as Lindon says, it is a subtle effect that adds up depending on track count. You eventually do hear quite a big difference, and a lot of people mixing in the box rely on these plugins in order to compete with mixes done on large format analog consoles of yesteryear.
To my mind, it's one of those things where every 2% effort at each stage, culminates in a final sound that would've been markedly different otherwise.
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Yes, I'm probably speaking about my own musical interests
much of my own music is either very digital intentionally, or hyper analog where I need 50's equipment.
Transistor based gear isn't used at all in my music so maybe I'm disregarding it just because of that.Not to mention it's freaking hard to model multiple transistors! Lol
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@griffinboy I'm not at that point yet tbh. Most of what I'm working on right now is audio analysis in realtime and sample playback. I do really want to do a distortion/saturation effect of my own at some point though!
