Now and again a tool you’ve been using for a long time throws up a surprise, a feature you’d never noticed before. That can either be because its overlooked, unlabelled, undocumented or even deliberately concealed. In this article we highlight a few of these, from overlooked features to Easter eggs created by the designers for fun.
Air Width As A Mono Button
One for the Pro Tools users and something which is genuinely useful day to day. Unlike most DAWs Pro Tools doesn’t have a mono button built into the mixer. We all know that checking mono compatibility is still necessary for almost all users but Pro Tools doesn’t offer the facility to check it in the mixer.
For stereo work an easy workaround using stock plugins is to instantiate the AIR Stereo Width plugin on your mix buss. Set the width all the way counterclockwise and you have mono. The only thing you need to remember is to bypass the plugin for stereo and to engage it for mono.
I use this trick but these days with the excellent MS matrix from Goodherz, a free plugin which can give you mono if you switch off the Side channel using the switch at the top.
Drum Leveler As A Gate
Sound Radix Drum Leveler is a fantastic solution if you need to even up the playing in a drum part but you don’t want to let heavy compression leave its signature on the sound. It works so well because rather than responding to the instantaneous level of the audio through a performance, it recognises the individual drum hits as discrete hits and treats them as a whole, changing their level but leaving the character unaffected, unless you want to change it of course.
The way this is usually used is to identify the hits you want to process using a combination of threshold controls and filters, in much the same way as with a conventional compressor or gate, but then to set a target level which you want the identified beats to reach. This is typically used to even out hits to a consistent level but the target level can be set all the way down, turning Drum Leveler into an extremely effective gate.
In a pleasing symmetry the amazingly effective Drum Gate from Sonnox also features a drum leveller which is perhaps overshadowed by its addictively trouble-free gating.
Holding Shift in Waves R-Vox For Level Matching
Waves’ R-Vox has been around for years and is still many people’s go to vocal compressor. It’s easy to see why. It presents a simplified UI with a limited set of controls. The choices are gate threshold, compression amount, and output attenuation. The fact that the last of those controls is attenuation, not makeup gain hints that the compression control does more than adjust the threshold. As you increase the compression effect the output level rises making properly level matched auditioning difficult.
The trick here is to shift-click the output attenuator before adjusting the compression control, this links them so that as the level increases with more compression, the output is attenuated. It’s not bona fide auto level matching but it’s really useful for dialling in settings. See it demonstrated in this article.
Band Pass Mode In EQIII
Another for Pro Tools users. Pro Tools’ ubiquitous 7 band EQIII plugin is still remarkably useable for such an old plugin and one of the things which makes it so useful is this trick. Instead of using the dial in a peak and sweep it to find your frequency technique, which always makes everything sound rather odd in my opinion, use this.
Hold Control and Shift on a Mac or Start and Shift on a PC and grab the frequency control of a band. This puts the EQ in Band Pass mode which solos that band allowing you to home in on the offending frequency. Keep the same keys down and adjust the Q to tighten or broaden the band. So much better than peering at a spectrum analyser!
De-Essing With Revoice Pro
Like gating de-essing is one of those tasks which should be simple but sometimes gets “less than simple”. For me, when my first call de-esser doesn’t fix it I’ll sometimes go to iZotope RX which does fantastic offline de-essing. Something which has passed me by until recently is the power available in Revoice Pro, not for tuning and timing but as a de-esser.
Revoice Pro treats “voiceless” aspects of a vocal such as breaths, esses and fricatives differently to the voiced, pitched elements like vowel sounds. Because of this it is easy to manually edit them on the timeline in Revoice Pro in much the same was as we are used to when editing pitch. See Revoice Pro in use as a de-esser in this article.
Some of the tricks and hidden features in plugins are just there for fun. I remember the original version of iZotope’s free Vinyl plugin which allowed you to unscrew the faceplate, causing it to fall off revealing a piece of paper in the guts of the virtual hardware which credited the developers, or practical ones like tweaking the screw heads on Boom! in Pro Tools - if you think of Boom! as being a bit cute and inoffensive, just dial up an 808 and click and drag up on the screws in the UI. It’s nastier than you remember!
Do you have any favourite overlooked, forgotten or just plain hidden features in your plugins you think more people should know about?