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Originally Posted by yep
That said, in a conceptual sense, it sounds like the makings of a smash hit. I would suggesting recording 120bpm quarter-note hits of an 808 kick sample, then triggering hard compression on the white noise instrumental track with the kick keyed to the side-chain input to get that big pumping club effect. Then find a 16-year-old girl to sing some foul-mouthed "get back" lyrics about how hot she is, apply autotune liberally and you should be all set (after multiband look-ahead limiting to within -3dBFS, of course). The white-noise genre is huge right now.
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So true its not funny. Although 'get back' lyrics are soo 2010. Kitschy Afrikaans is the new 'thing'.
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There is also the problem of internal digital processors-- are you certain that every plugin you're using has good floating-point internal calculations? And if so, what about your saturation/compression/analog-ifier/guitar effects? How do they know when to start "saturating"? What about the cutoff filters on your AD and DA converters? What about inter-sample clipping that the digital system cannot detect?
this stuff is not always obvious to hear. Your clip LED will light up when you get that screechy white-noise "deep" digital clipping, but you'd probably notice that anyway. This kind of "hidden" clipping tends to have a more subtle effect, just flat-topping the waveform peaks and creating a harsh, brittle, "digital" sound. It's not always easy to hear in the thick of a recording session, but a little on the bass, a little on the high-hats, a little on the snare, a little on the kick, and next thing you know, you've got a "flat", "cheap", "digital"-sounding mix and you're out shopping for ribbon mics and tube preamps.
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I have a feeling there's more of this happening than people realize. With some plugins (Waves, BBE Sonic Maximizer come to mind), even the slightest amount of clipping starts to sound really bad.
Basically one can hope that every DSP routine in every plugin is coded correctly to handle clipping and intersample peaks, or simply bring the levels down, and not have to worry about it.
Maybe there's some placebo effect that comes from 'doing the right thing', but after reading about this, I went back to a 'vortex of shit' mix that just sounded undefined, harsh and lacking space. Sure enough everything was pushed right up and the input gain on my limiter (last plugin) was at -9! I brought everything down (making sure no dynamics plugins were effected), and without making any other changes (aside from adjusting the limiter so the RMS was the same is before) exported the mix...
All of a sudden the subconscious 'harshness' and 'fatigue' was gone and replaced by 'openness' and 'clarity'. I was quite impressed. While the difference was not as obvious as when I started properly using HPF/LPF and LCR panning it was a similar 'aha' moment.
The way I see it, trim, like HPF/LPF are on consoles for a reason, because (more often than not) you are supposed to use them!
I wish Reaper's mixer would have these as options too. Not only would the workflow be much better, but less experienced users who only know digital mixing might realize the importance of gain staging and filtering without having to randomly stumble across, and wade though hundreds of pages on why their 'recordings sound like ass' or 'why most ITB mixes don't sound as good as Analog mixes'...