Spectrum Thief - EQ Match Plugin with IR-Export

[00:00:00] Yo folks, welcome back.
[00:00:01] So in this video, I want to show you a new plugin I found last week or actually I haven't
[00:00:06] found that someone sent it to me and I installed it and I found it very useful.
[00:00:11] So it's a very useful plugin.
[00:00:13] That's what I want to say.
[00:00:15] It's also free.
[00:00:16] It's not open source, but it's free so you don't have to pay anything.
[00:00:20] And it's made by a YouTuber.
[00:00:22] I watched earlier this year a video of him debunking some kind of input gain for amplifiers
[00:00:28] in digital environments and it was very satisfying to watch.
[00:00:34] And I put the link to his YouTube channel also in the description below and also, of
[00:00:38] course, to the website.
[00:00:39] I'll show you here.
[00:00:41] So this is the plugin.
[00:00:42] It's called Spectrum Thief.
[00:00:44] And most of his plugins is sent out around guitar players, right?
[00:00:49] And this is here.
[00:00:50] The purpose of this plugin is to actually clone the EQ curve of speaker cabinets or amplifiers,
[00:00:57] right?
[00:00:58] So you put your guitar through it and then it shapes the tone or spectrum here in a
[00:01:02] certain way and you can just copy this curve or this EQ curve and then you can put it
[00:01:08] in your door with an impulse response on it and then you more or less have the same sound.
[00:01:16] So this is the idea of this plugin and, of course, I misuse it for something completely
[00:01:21] different or maybe something different.
[00:01:24] So it's more or less an EQ matcher with an IR generator included, right?
[00:01:30] So you record here the target curve and then you record the source curve and then you have
[00:01:37] here the difference as an EQ curve.
[00:01:40] And then you can export this as an IR response or IR sample and then you can use it inside
[00:01:47] of your convolution reverb.
[00:01:49] I made a video earlier about this kind of process, but without this plugin.
[00:01:55] I showed you this in a video with using an IR signal, a small little sample, sending it
[00:02:02] through an EQ and then recording it and then you can use it kind of inside of the convolution
[00:02:07] reverb and you more or less copied or cloned the whole curve.
[00:02:11] But here it's more a streamlined plugin, right?
[00:02:14] You just record this, record that, export IR sample, done.
[00:02:18] So it's a bit easier, but you can also, instead of exporting the IR sample, you can just leave
[00:02:26] this plugin on and just apply this kind of curve instead of using the IR sample here.
[00:02:33] So I show you this in a minute how I use it.
[00:02:37] Something that you need to know, or maybe I'll tell you this a bit later.
[00:02:41] So here in the background, you can see some kind of track I made yesterday.
[00:02:45] It's very cheesy, very 90s atmospheric, intelligent drum based stuff.
[00:02:51] It's kind of a chill out for me to produce the stuff at the moment because I don't have
[00:02:55] to think about anything like a sound design.
[00:02:58] I just put here the Triton VST on it, select some sounds and play some random melodies and
[00:03:04] then something gets out of it, right?
[00:03:08] So it's very kind of meditating way of doing my evenings.
[00:03:15] Anyway, so in the background here, you can see there's a track and on the master here,
[00:03:21] let's go to the master.
[00:03:22] I have here some EQ curves, so I have a match EQ with a very straight curve and I use this
[00:03:28] match EQ here to copy kind of the sound of these 90s atmospheric drum based tunes, right?
[00:03:36] I just recorded multiple tracks I like from LTJ Book M or whatever.
[00:03:42] It's trendy at the moment.
[00:03:44] And then I have some kind of curve from all of these tracks, get the average and then
[00:03:50] I apply it here to my track to get kind of the same sound.
[00:03:55] And then I have after that, I'm using the balance one by Synaptic and you can dial in
[00:04:01] here target slope and high cut, low cut, right?
[00:04:06] So it balances out the spectrum to this kind of settings here, which is very nice, right?
[00:04:14] You can see at the target curve here, yellow.
[00:04:19] So it does some kind of EQing to the sound.
[00:04:24] So the problem now is the curfee queue takes a bit of CPU time and this balance one thing
[00:04:31] here also takes a lot of CPU for some reason on my PC.
[00:04:35] And you can see here also DSP meter is very high.
[00:04:39] So also I want to share this project with my patrons, right?
[00:04:43] So the problem is they probably don't have balance one and curfee queue and so on.
[00:04:49] So what I can do now is I can take a spectrum thief here and just record the sound in front
[00:04:57] of the curfee queue, right?
[00:04:59] So I just go in here, let this play and say, this is my source.
[00:05:03] You can see here it's recording.
[00:05:07] Very important to know for this measure here is that it doesn't take the average curve.
[00:05:14] I think it's the maximum peak value of each of these spectrum bins here.
[00:05:23] So it's not really made for matching one track to another track, the EQ curve of one track
[00:05:30] to another track, because there you want to use the average.
[00:05:34] Here it's maximum peak value.
[00:05:36] So we have here something, it's probably okay.
[00:05:38] Then you can stop the recording and then you just track this after the curfee queue here
[00:05:44] and balance one and then you say, this is my target curve.
[00:05:47] You can see in blue here, my target and also in white, you can see the difference between
[00:05:55] the source and the target.
[00:05:58] So it takes away a lot of low end.
[00:06:02] So what I'm seeing here is basically what balance one and the curfee queue is doing in
[00:06:08] just one EQ curve.
[00:06:11] So it settles down, it doesn't move anymore, so you can stop recording and now I can disable
[00:06:17] curfee queue and balance EQ, and then enable this here by Audition IR.
[00:06:29] It's more or less the same.
[00:06:43] And with this, we have now here also here the smoothing, as you can see, it copies very
[00:06:49] much every small little bin, so it's a very high resolution.
[00:06:54] So what I do most of the times is I increase here the smoothing to get rid of all these
[00:07:01] smaller little individual frequency bins and just have a more like a smooth response and
[00:07:08] a very smoothed out EQ curve.
[00:07:13] What we also can do here is we can remove the low end.
[00:07:17] So please don't EQ the low end or please don't EQ the top end, so we can narrow this down
[00:07:23] to a certain frequency range if you want to.
[00:07:29] And you can hear in the background, every time I change this here, some kind of crackling.
[00:07:37] That's because it more or less rewrites in the background the IR sample here.
[00:07:46] You can see, this is just a wave sample.
[00:07:52] So this is the wave sample he can save as an IRR sample, so we can do this here, export,
[00:07:57] right?
[00:07:58] And I export this to, I don't know, let's say track example.
[00:08:05] I save this here and now I have a wave file on my hard drive.
[00:08:13] And what I can do here, let me see, actually, this one here, track example, so I have the
[00:08:22] sample here and now I disable this and I use my convolution reverb and I put this here
[00:08:30] into the convolution reverb, mix all the way up, wet gain all the way up and I have the
[00:08:35] same effect.
[00:08:36] So with this, I can more or less remove the spectrum thief, I can remove balance one,
[00:08:54] I can remove a curve EQ and just use here my convolution reverb, export this whole project
[00:09:01] and can send it over to my patreons and they don't need to have all these plug-ins installed
[00:09:07] on their system.
[00:09:09] So this is sometimes how I use it or how I use it in the last week, I have to make some
[00:09:15] more experiments if this actually is viable or if there's actually some problems with
[00:09:19] this but so far I found no problems and you don't need to export here the IR sample, right?
[00:09:27] You can just leave spectrum thief on it and let auditioning IR on and then you can save
[00:09:35] it with the project and next time you reload the project, it's still there, right?
[00:09:39] That's also something like unity gain or normalize.
[00:09:43] So when you switch it to spectrum, you can see when you hit unity, sometimes you can
[00:09:49] go over 0 dB with the sample so normalizing this brings it down and it makes everything
[00:09:57] a bit quieter.
[00:09:59] Okay, another example is here, I have some kind of let's say I have a synthesized snare
[00:10:05] drum and sometimes I'm really obsessed with cloning snare sounds for some reason.
[00:10:13] I like a snare from some track and I really, really like the snare and I want to have something
[00:10:17] that sounds exactly the same.
[00:10:20] So after the snare generator, just some noise samples, write this one and it sounds very
[00:10:29] synthesized so it's missing some kind of shape, some tone and let's say I have here some kind
[00:10:36] of sample and I use a snare sample I like, there's a snare top, let me see if I found
[00:10:44] something, so something like this and I put this here on a track and maybe loop this and
[00:10:57] we go here with a thief on it and we say this is our target sound here and it really just
[00:11:10] tries to get all these small little nuances here from the snare, everything also in the
[00:11:15] top end, all these small little bins and frequency changes so it's a very, very complex EQ here
[00:11:23] at the moment so and I just put this then on my snare here, just move this for a moment
[00:11:30] or maybe let's just leave it in and mute it and here I do a snare of recording on, shit,
[00:11:40] let's put it back here, remove it and do the same thing, that's enough and then put it
[00:11:52] here on this one and record the source and you can see there's many differences here,
[00:12:07] right, so yeah it's a synthesized snare but it's kind of the same, it's a clappy rim
[00:12:13] shoddy kind of snare sound, so let's put on here Audition IR, it sounds like this and
[00:12:22] the reason why it sounds like this is that we have here the attack phase of this snare
[00:12:27] sound, a lot of different peaks or frequency peaks than we have in the tail but because
[00:12:35] this is kind of a max peak thing, it remembers all the frequencies from all the positions
[00:12:41] inside of this sample so we have this kind of metallic kind of sound, so what I do then
[00:12:50] is I let's say here export this and say D&B snare EQ let's say 3, save and I can remove
[00:13:04] here the spectrum thief again, EQ is it this here, I can't remember, it's probably this,
[00:13:21] so let's use a convolution thing here, all the way up, this all the way up, it sounds
[00:13:31] like this but we can now use here in modulator, just put the EQ stuff here on the attack,
[00:13:43] so with this I get basically the EQ stuff only on the attack phase, on the attack part
[00:13:58] and the tail of the snare here is more or less my old snare or the white noise I am
[00:14:03] using here with the samples, but I get kind of a sense or some kind of tonality or maybe
[00:14:16] it's better instead of using this ADSR here to use segments, so with this we can shape
[00:14:22] this a bit, let's disable smoothing here, use seconds no looping and you can say only
[00:14:32] now if your full time in the beginning, you can shape this a bit better, so this is with
[00:14:57] and I also use this for hi-hats and percussion sounds and so on, so it's very cool to just
[00:15:10] clone these kind of snare sounds or snare-equeuing differences and then put this on your synthesized
[00:15:18] stuff and you can generate snares from that and you can of course modify in all kinds
[00:15:24] of directions, so it also sounds different when you put different sounds into it, if
[00:15:29] you change this here for maybe something different, I don't know how this sounds, but if you
[00:15:45] have something that's more like, or maybe here I exchange this for, is there actually a clap?
[00:15:53] We want clap from Bitwig, yeah like I said you can shape then these synthesized sounds
[00:16:09] more into the right EQ curve positions or you get the right sounds out of it, the right
[00:16:16] tonality out of it, so this is how I use it at the moment, I use it for snare sounds,
[00:16:21] percussion sounds and hi-hats and also just cloning an EQ curve inside of a track where
[00:16:30] I've maybe, sometimes I have four or five EQs on a track and then I just want to reduce
[00:16:38] it, I want to consolidate more or less everything into just one device and then I have here
[00:16:46] an IR sample instead of five EQs or something like this, so that's how I use it at the moment
[00:16:53] at least, so I want to show you this, like I said I put you the link in the description
[00:16:57] below if you want to try it out, it's free, just try it out and have some fun, maybe you
[00:17:02] come up with some better ideas, the intention is basically to clone amplifiers, but you
[00:17:09] can clone everything more or less, that's it, thanks for watching, leave a like, leave
[00:17:14] a subscription, let me know what you think and I'll see you in the next video, bye.
[00:17:18] 20 days, only 20 days left until Bitwig 6, nice, bye.
[00:17:24] [BLANK_AUDIO]