Summing plugins, snake oil or useful?
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I'm looking into summing plugins, you know those claiming to emulate consoles, adding harmonic content.. I've been using Waves NLS in the past and liked it, though I can't really tell what it does and getting away from Waves altogether I'm trying to make my own...
Has anyone had a look into those magical things before and would like to share their insight?I've checked out airwindows console and I can't really make heads or tales of it, some other companies model channel strips that don't even do anything nonlinear to the signal apart form being normal eq's... AP Mastering's rants come to mind ;) I don't want to create something that can be done in Pro Q3, otherwise where would be the point.
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?
If, say, channels interact because components are close to each other and there is some "bleed" that somehow is sonically pleasing, then that wouldn't be possible in a plugin anyways as DAW channels can't influence others or "bleed" apart from send and just adding some tanh saturation for "warmth" seems morally wrong ;))
https://instagram.com/morphoice - 80s inspired Synthwave Music, Arcade & Gameboy homebrew!
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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!
