Original subtitles

In this video we're going to have a look at using some spatial effects from the

Soundtoys bundle.

We're going to start off simply, then we're going to build up the complexity.

The first sound we're going to look at is just a nice basic slap delay using

Echo Boy. But I'm going to show you some neat tricks that we can use in order to

get this just right.

So slap delay allows us to add some depth to a vocal without adding reverb.

Now reverb's great, but if everything has reverb on it, it quickly clutters up

a mix. So in my own music, I often try to combine delays with reverbs, with

choruses, with doublers and things like that to create space without having to

fill everything with reverb.

Now I'd say the fewer elements you can get away with putting reverb on, the

better. And it's actually best to be able to really clearly hear the reverbs.

If you find you're putting reverbs on and you can't actually really hear them,

then there's not really much point in putting them on because they're just

creating... clutter and taking away headroom for everything else to be

louder so yeah a combination of choruses delays early reflections doublers things

like that allow you to take away the need for having just reverb to add space

essentially we're going to demonstrate this with this track here now i'm going

to put a instance of echo boy just in mono onto our lead vocal so

we're going to work on this part of the track let's have a listen just bypass

echo boy

Okay, so let's bring Echo Boy back in.

Now, let me show you this. I have an app here which is known as Music Math.

Now, you could get equivalents of this. I think there's iPhone apps that do it

as well.

But this one I find very useful. It just sits on my dock and I open it whenever I

need it.

Now, this allows you to calculate... in milliseconds, delay times or reverb

times or whatever it might be. It basically allows you to work out how

much beats of the bar are worth in milliseconds.

Now it could be compressor release times as well as another very useful way of

applying this.

So our tempo is 130.

Now I don't think this was played to a click, but I've kind of worked it out

and it's around 130.

So now this can tell us that Let's say a 16th note at 130 beats per minute is

worth 115.38 milliseconds.

A 32nd note, 57 milliseconds.

Now, slap delay falls kind of in this territory, so somewhere maybe around 40,

60 milliseconds up to about 120, 130 milliseconds.

Now, if it gets too much above that, it starts to sound like a delay in its own

right. There's too much separation between the sound and the delay.

and too much the other way, so too fast, it ends up merging with the sound and

creating almost a phase-y, chorus-y kind of effect.

So let's try these two values and see what we come up with.

So go into Echo Boy.

Now I'm going to take it off being aligned to the grid, and now it's just

working in milliseconds by pressing on this time button here.

Now this is going to allow us to input the time as milliseconds.

So let's start off with 115.

Now just to make sure you understand this, 115 milliseconds is the value of a

16th note, so we're going to be doing it in time with the music.

I'll bring the mix down a little bit.

So what I'm going to do is bring this in and bring this out so you can hear the

effect.

Okay. And let's try the other value which was 57.

Okay.

Again, I'm gonna bring it in and out.

Now what you're listening for is the sense of depth you get when I bring in

the effect.

So it allows the vocal to come forward out of the mix a little bit and it kind

of lifts it away from the instrumentation.

It does that by creating that kind of sense of front-back perspective.

So once again, shut your eyes and listen.

What you're listening for is depth and also the way the vocal comes forward.

So it's really nice. It lifts the vocal up, brings it out.

Now, the way we set this up, we don't have any feedback for a slap delay

effect. You can obviously do what you want, but generally we don't have any

feedback. because we don't want to hear the delay kind of repeats over and over

again. We just want to hear a single slap back that you'd get if you were

kind of speaking and sound was coming back off the wall at you.

Now, what we could also try doing is EQing this. It's a good idea to try and

EQ your effects returns because otherwise you end up cluttering the mix

again. So you don't necessarily have to have lots of low frequencies and high

frequencies in your slap delay. You might want to, you might not, but you

could definitely try just kind of taming.

the lows and the highs let's see if we can do that in the mix she's

gonna

put

it in solo for a sec

Okay, what we could also try doing is adding some saturation.

So we talked about saturation in the last few videos, so we're going to add

harmonics, add fatness.

She's stomping on a bed of roses.

Forces pull her in as she poses.

Sick of living life, going through the motions.

I know she won't.

Okay, what we could also try doing of course is playing with the style as well

so we could try some different flavors of delay

I think for this track I want to keep it quite transparent and clean and not too

colored. So we'll leave it on the studio tape.

Okay, so that's our basic slap delay effect, which is perfect in Echo Boy.

Sounds amazing.

Now we're going to have a look at adding a vocal double effect.

We're going to do that using Crystallizer.

Now, whereas before we were using Echo Boy to add a slap delay in mono, the

Crystallizer is going to...

kind of follow the same principle of adding that front back perspective but

we're also going to add in stereo width as well so if you have the space in your

mix down to add some extra stereo width to a sound this could be a great way to

go so let's have a listen to it in solo just with the default patch

okay so this is sounding more like

a traditional delay at the moment now the way crystallizer works by sampling

grains of sound what it calls splices then we can delay these.

We can add kind of feedback in a traditional delay sense, but also we can

pitch shift these grains of sound as well.

And it's the pitch shifting which can be great for adding that kind of chorus

style effect.

Now whereas before we used music math to calculate in milliseconds the beats of

the bar, say an eighth note or a sixteenth note, this time we're just

going to do it with the controls directly.

So let's say we want to make this a sixteenth note, so it's sampling

sixteenth note.

splices of sound and then we can delay these let's say by a 30 second note

let's have a listen to how this sounds

okay

now importantly we have a reverse and forward control here now at the moment

this is reversing the grains of sound but i'm going to put it to forward

because in this case we actually want the sound to be quite natural and

ordinarily i find reverse better for more kind of esoteric special effects

let's also open the tweak control here as well

so

you

can really hear what that's adding already and it makes a big difference

having this set to forward rather than reverse Now underneath the tweak

controls here we have some extra parameters.

We can actually add a pitch offset.

Now this allows us to add plus and minus 13 cents in this case to the left and

the right hand channels.

This is what helps us create the chorus effect.

Because the more you have difference between the left and the right hand

channel the more that equates to extra stereo width.

So let's try just a small amount, 10 cents.

And we can also add a splice offset and a delay offset to the right channel

which will again create differences between the two.

let's add some of this smoothing to create a more natural kind of smooth

effect

okay

let's try filtering a little bit again try and kind of bed

the sound in take away some of the frequencies you don't necessarily need

from this part

Let's even try speeding up the splice time.

We

don't need too much

of this recycle here because we don't want to...

have too many kind of delay taps want it to be more of a single tap sound

so

with the sound like this you actually want it to be

more felt than heard you don't want to necessarily go oh look there's a cool

stereo effect you just want to have the vocal sounding really nice and wide

without it actually being kind of an obvious effect Let's do it in the track

and you can hear again that depth is being added the vocal come forward but

also in this case some stereo width.

I'll leave it out to start with and bring it in.

Adds a really nice space to the vocal.

So this is a tried and tested technique.

There's lots of plugins that do this, but Crystallizer is just amazing at

doing and it has that really nice kind of analog sound to it okay so that is

adding a really nice doubler effect using crystallizer so just finally on

these kind of spatial effects let's grab electric guitar part here

i'm just going to make my waveforms bigger so we can see it

Okay, so another plugin we could use from our Soundtoys arsenal is

MicroShift. Now this is more of a traditional chorus style effect.

So we can dial in the amount we want.

Choose where it's going to be focused in the frequency spectrum.

And we've got three different styles to choose from.

I like that one star there, and a detune amount.

And also delay.

So this is again creating something similar to that crystallizer doubler

effect. But we don't have as much control over the parameters here.

But again we're adding interest to the sound, stereo width to the sound.

and we're also helping to kind of bed it into the mix essentially.

Let's do it in context. Now this is not necessarily the right sound to use it on

in this mix but let's see what it sounds like.

That actually works pretty nicely on that sound. So that's MicroShift, which

we can use to add a chorus effect. Now, of course, we can chain these plugins

together, and we're going to have a look at the effects rack a little bit later

on. But there's nothing stopping us placing, let's say, Echo Boy with a slap

delay, followed by the MicroShift.

So whenever you want to push something out to the sides a bit, make it a little

bit wider, kind of just a little bit less focused in an area essentially,

that's what these stereo effects can do as well, is if you have a sound which is

too focused in an area and a bit too kind of pokey and annoying, you can help

spread it using these stereo effects.

So anytime you want to do that to a sound, adding micro shift or

crystallizer using the kind of settings we were looking at, that can really help

kind of push things out to the sides, spread them, kind of just...

yeah just stop them being so pokey in the mix or of course add stereo width

that's what you're going for okay so that's part one of our spatial effects

looked at in the next video we're going to have a look at some of the other

plugins we can use as spatial effects if we're looking for reverbs and also

things that we can use to create rhythmic interest like pan effects and

tremolo effects thanks for watching