

In reality, The Rocket isn’t free, but it does have an eternal demo mode so you can try it out. Between the hits, where the sound is quiet, the compressor will no longer be working, so the two channels of audio will be identical and will cancel out – no audio will be heard.įor this, I’m using a ‘free’ compressor that will run in most major audio hosts – Stillwell Audio’s The Rocket. Compressors modify the volume of output audio based on loudness of the input, so when the sound is loud, we’ll compress the polarity/phase inverted channel (very heavily), making the two tracks different from each other which will allow the audio to leak through from the primary track. What we’re going to do is flip the phase of a second, duplicate channel, then change the audio on that channel, but only where we want sound to leak through (in this case, the Attack of the drum) – where the audio is that we don’t want (the reverberance of the room), we’re going to leave that alone – the two channels will be identical at those points, will cancel out and be inaudible, The perfect tool for this?

The slightest change to either track and audio will start to leak through and you won’t get the same result. Why would we want to do this? This trick only works if the audio streams are identical. This is what Polarity/Phase Invert allows you to do – completely cancel out two channels of audio. But, flip the Phase on _ one_ of the tracks and what happens? The audio vanishes. Now play both of them together – it should be louder. But now, _ duplicate_ the track (literally – plugins and all, EQ settings, the lot – most DAWs should be able to do this for you – in Cubase, right click the track and select ‘Duplicate Track’). Flip the Phase Button a couple of times – hear any difference? Hopefully not.

First, insert and play some audio on any channel in your DAW. I mentioned phase/polarity invert a few lines back… and if you’re not sure what happens when you phase invert a signal – try this. This is a bit of brute force, but it can work. With these, we can tweak the Attack portion of a sound and boost it, and then separately attenuate the Release portion of the sound – the ambience. We could just start with a Transient Designer… and you probably should! You could try something like the Universal Audio SPL Transient Designer (the SPL De-Verb is apparently a re-work of this very effect)… and Stillwell Audio (who we’ll be coming to in a moment) have you covered with the rather excellent Transient Monster (1). You may change your mind later down the line… That’s when De-Verb can come in handy – we’re going to attempt to remove a significant amount of the ambience that has been recorded without adversely effecting the quality of the recording. Of course, the best solution here is to choose a suitable environment to record those drums in, alongside careful selection and placement of microphones but… that’s not always possible. RIGHT – Hamilton Mausoleum WET – Source: Wikipedia

Make the room bigger, give it a more intricate structure, and thousands upon thousands of tiny echos will add together to create a slow decay to the sound – reverb… The moment you place the drums in a real room, you are going to get reflections from the room – ambience. Here, there would be no reflections from the walls, ceiling or floor, and you would only hear the attack of the drums and the natural decay from their shells.
#Vst plugin karmafx reverb free pro#
Also, I’m doing this in Cubase, but this will work in Logic X, Pro Tools, Reaper, Studio One, FL Studio, SONAR – whatever your flavour of DAW…įirstly – what do I mean by De-Verb? Imagine recording Drums in an Anechoic Chamber. No time now to go into Polarity Inversion, Phase Inversion, the differences between them – you want that, read the daddy of articles over on Sound on Sound – Phase Demystified. We’re going to do something along those lines here… so make sure you’re familiar with the operation of the Phase/Polarity invert button -> it’ll look something like this (Orange in this Image). This idea stems from a chat I had with the excellent Bruce Aisher a while back on how Brian Eno (it would be, wouldn’t it )) used phase/polarity inversion during mixing.
