The DAW of my choice. Discussing Reaper.

Hi again.
Today we're gonna talk about best (IMO) digital audio workstation called Reaper.

I used to use FL Studio as my main DAW. It has a lot of advantages but there are couple of dissapointments:
1) Appearance. Beautiful but hard and sumetimes unuseful interface (for instanse I want to open several plugins at the moment but they take a lot of workspace)
2) Pattern system. I don't usually do club or electro music so I don't need a lot of looping phrases in my mixes. And this option forces me to create new and new patterns. And it's getting boring.
3) System Requirements. It's easy to listen and mix light brojects. But If you want to use a lot of plugins hen get ready to get smashed (yes!) by memory lack. I have 2GB RAM and want to upgrade but at the moment it's hard to use FL for big projects.

And one day I discovered Reaper. Simple but very-very-very powerful program to record your songs and make them sound as good as you want them to! Here are some reasons why I prefer Reaper:
1) Usability. No patterns, no disturbing interface - everything is simple as possible! Playlist on the top, mixer on the bottom and nothing more that could make is look bulky.
2) Requirements. My track "Metal Factory" is the first song that was created by Reaper. It has 2 guitar tracks, kick, top snare, bottom snare, hi-hat, overheads, room and etc tracks. About 13 channels at all + master track. Every channel have inserts. And I mixed this song only in one session without any crashes, critical reboots and other. Stability - one of the greatest advantages of Reaper.
3) Price. Full version of FL costs $300. But full version of Reaper costs only $60. For better perfomance.
4) Comfortable Piano Roll. Not so important but very useful thing. You can tweak velocity or other parameters of note just by hovering your note and scrolling mouse wheel up or down.

But everything has "dark side of the moon".
For example I like Peavey ReValver MKIII.V VST Plugin for my guitars. But there are problems with it in Reaper. Plugin resets everytime when you open plugin window. So I just tweak my amp settings and never change them during current session.

I hope this article helped you a bit. Feel free to ask and comment!

_____

unLatem.

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"Metal Factory". Track presentation.

Hi there and it's me again.
Today I want to show you my track called "Metal Factory".
You can check it out here:

Now something about the structure of song:
Guitar:
Chain: DI->Revalver MKIII. Then I added some EQ. I know that sound isn't excellent but something is done. Also, guitars are double-tracked. Each speaker plays different guitar track.

You could check the links to full version of track in video's description.

_____
Artur.

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What is impulse response?

Hello, this is me again :)

Let's talk about impulse responses (IR). But I'll give little interlude.

Guitar stack is created with two parts: an amplifier and cabinet speaker. Amplifier creates sound (and creates distortion). But it's not this distortion what we hear. Raw sound contains a lot of hiss above 5-6 khz. Then goes speaker cabinet. It is special guitar speaker, which pulls off bad high frequences.

Let's create virtual stack. Here's an example:

I reviewed these plugins in this article. And it sounds like this:


As we can hear it sounds ok. But let's turn impulse cabinet off and listen:


Sounds bad. A lot of bad high frequences make a huge hiss.
But what about EQ snapshots?

Cabinet is enabled.

Cabinet is disabled.

Conclusion:

Cabinet impulse response is short *.wav file which has frequency characeristics of cabinet sound. And IR plugin just analyze impulse file and substrack concrete frequences from signal. And we hear good tone as output signal.

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How to remove hiss (bad HF) after software amp simulator?

Hello everyone, this is me again.

In my last post I promised to make hiss removing tutorial. So check this out :)

Few words about amp. For this topic I used Revalver Peavey MK III amp software, Flathill amp (Mesa Boggie Emulation).

Let,s listen to our sound:



Here is a bit of hiss in high frequences range. Now wo gonna remove it.

1. Select band with small Q (0,15-0.30 oct) in high frequences.
2. Gain it a lot (5-7 dB)
3. Move band from about 5k to 12k. Remember the frequency where hiss gets louder.
4. Return to remembered frequency and decrease volume of our frequency very much. Finally it will be similar to this picture:

Example

Now let's listen to new sound:



Sometimes it's hard to hear this noise. But it makes ears tired faster.
Be careful, don't cut good characteristic frequences of hi-gain guitar.

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