DSEQ3 vs Spectral Compressor vs Spectraft - Spectral Plugin Comparison

[00:00:00] Hey folks, welcome back.
[00:00:01] So today I want to talk about the Spectral Compressors here,
[00:00:04] Spectraft, DSEQ3, and Spectral Compressor.
[00:00:08] And some people ask me what do I use, why I use it,
[00:00:11] and what do I recommend.
[00:00:13] So I want to give you my personal opinion here
[00:00:15] what I use and how I use it and why,
[00:00:18] and also give you some, maybe some ideas, I don't know.
[00:00:22] So the Spectral Compressor I showed you in the last video,
[00:00:25] so I want to start here with DSEQ3,
[00:00:28] because this is something here that I would say
[00:00:30] is the same as Sooth.
[00:00:32] So I don't use Sooth, and I know a lot of people use it,
[00:00:36] but I don't use it, I use this one here,
[00:00:39] because it's not iLog based, I hate iLog for some reason.
[00:00:44] It also has some neat features on top of that.
[00:00:48] For instance, here, there's some smart AI stuff
[00:00:53] to figure out the threshold,
[00:00:55] there's here a custom threshold curve,
[00:00:57] so you can analyze a track and then take the spectrum curve
[00:01:02] or the spectrum shape and put it on another track.
[00:01:06] That's not possible with Sooth here, you can do it,
[00:01:09] and it's also way cheaper.
[00:01:11] So that's why I use DSEQ3, so if you use Sooth,
[00:01:14] you can just say this is more or less the same thing,
[00:01:17] just with more features.
[00:01:18] You can also see I take out the low end,
[00:01:21] and this is not an EQ, this curve here,
[00:01:23] this is the threshold curve,
[00:01:25] which means there is no threshold for the bass here,
[00:01:29] and this is here currently on the track on the master.
[00:01:32] And for the bass sound or for the sub,
[00:01:39] I usually just use a sine wave,
[00:01:40] and the sine wave is stable as stable AF, okay?
[00:01:45] So why do I should put here a compressor on it
[00:01:48] and mess with the volume of the bass, right?
[00:01:52] So this is here the low cut, you can disable it,
[00:01:55] and you can see it wants to instantly pull down here
[00:01:58] the volume of the sub,
[00:01:59] and you can see there's a fluctuation,
[00:02:01] it goes up and down.
[00:02:02] I don't like it, I want to have a stable bass,
[00:02:04] so I usually just take it out here,
[00:02:07] and just leave the compressor on the top end
[00:02:12] or on the mid range here.
[00:02:14] And yeah, this kind of works like a compressor almost,
[00:02:18] it looks like it because we have here something
[00:02:22] like chain link or channel link, not chain link,
[00:02:26] how it links basically the left to the right channel
[00:02:28] or if it processes this individually.
[00:02:31] There's here attack time, release time,
[00:02:35] but these two are not in milliseconds,
[00:02:37] it's in percentage for some reason,
[00:02:40] so that's why I mean that it's almost a compressor.
[00:02:44] So I have this here always on very slow attack times
[00:02:49] and release times,
[00:02:50] because if you pull down the attack time here,
[00:02:52] it reacts to every incoming little transient,
[00:02:57] and it sounds not good.
[00:02:58] So when I have here a slow attack time,
[00:03:12] means it only reacts to tonal sounds that are a bit longer.
[00:03:16] So it only detects or gets in sounds that are longer,
[00:03:20] not that the transients,
[00:03:22] not the attack times of the kick and so on.
[00:03:24] So you don't mess with that,
[00:03:26] you just want to reduce some resonances here
[00:03:29] in certain frequencies.
[00:03:31] When we talk about resonances,
[00:03:33] I have to make basically this kind of disclaimer.
[00:03:36] These tools here are very dangerous in my opinion.
[00:03:40] If you don't know what you do,
[00:03:42] and you just put it on and pull this down, right?
[00:03:45] I see this all the time,
[00:03:46] people do it on YouTube videos with Soothe,
[00:03:49] they just pull this down.
[00:03:51] You remove basically the resonances,
[00:03:53] which is kind of what you want to do,
[00:03:55] but if you do it too much,
[00:03:56] you more or less remove music from the music,
[00:04:00] because music is resonances,
[00:04:02] and if you remove all the resonances,
[00:04:05] there is nothing left to listen to, okay?
[00:04:08] So this is a bit of a drastic thing to say,
[00:04:11] but you know what I mean,
[00:04:13] you have to really use this in kind of subtle ways,
[00:04:18] because you can destroy a lot of things
[00:04:20] pretty easily with this.
[00:04:22] You just pull this down,
[00:04:24] and your music is basically gone.
[00:04:25] And now it sounds very spectral, spectral-ish.
[00:04:38] Also, we have just something like selectivity,
[00:04:40] which is interesting,
[00:04:43] because not every spectral compressor has this.
[00:04:46] For instance, here, the spectral compressor
[00:04:48] doesn't have this.
[00:04:49] So the selectivity means,
[00:04:52] when we pull down here the threshold,
[00:04:53] you can see individual frequencies are getting reduced.
[00:04:58] This is because we have this here on sharp.
[00:05:02] If we pull this down to, let's say, soft,
[00:05:06] then you can see we have more like a broad band
[00:05:10] gain reduction.
[00:05:11] So the selectivity groups certain frequencies together.
[00:05:15] So if you have this here on sharp,
[00:05:18] it takes basically every small little frequency,
[00:05:21] every frequency bin individually and pulls it down,
[00:05:25] which can make it sound very harsh or very digital fast.
[00:05:30] And if you have this here on soft,
[00:05:32] it's more like one band.
[00:05:34] You have one band, and this is one band gain reduction,
[00:05:37] so it doesn't make any sense, mostly.
[00:05:40] So you want to have this here on the middle ground,
[00:05:42] so something around 50, I don't know,
[00:05:45] where you have individual frequencies,
[00:05:47] but they're kind of grouped together
[00:05:48] into small little bands.
[00:05:50] So this is at least how I see it.
[00:05:56] So if you have, let's say, you have a recording,
[00:05:59] and there's some kind of small little single sound,
[00:06:04] single frequency in there that you want to reduce,
[00:06:06] then you can pull this up to sharp
[00:06:09] and just see if you can take or bring
[00:06:13] this one frequency down.
[00:06:14] So it's more like for restoration or damage control,
[00:06:21] but just for musical tasks,
[00:06:25] and you want to reduce some resonances,
[00:06:27] so you want to have this here on the middle ground,
[00:06:29] more or less.
[00:06:30] Then we have something here like gain reduction strength,
[00:06:34] which is something like ratio on a compressor,
[00:06:36] but it's not like the same here.
[00:06:39] You have a multiplier,
[00:06:40] so everything that's above the threshold
[00:06:42] gets pulled down one time.
[00:06:44] It's the strength, which is okay.
[00:06:47] So what goes above the threshold gets pulled down,
[00:06:50] which is okay, but you can also go up here to 10 times.
[00:06:53] So everything that's 1 dB above the threshold
[00:06:56] gets pulled down probably by 10 dB.
[00:06:59] So it's more or less like a ratio thing.
[00:07:03] So if you have like harsh frequencies
[00:07:05] that are just small in size
[00:07:07] and go barely above the threshold, but you can catch it,
[00:07:11] and then you want to pull it down heavily,
[00:07:13] then you can go up to 10 here,
[00:07:15] but usually I have this around one or maybe even less,
[00:07:19] just to have subtle changes to tame some of the frequencies
[00:07:23] here in a very subtle way.
[00:07:26] So that's usually how I use the DSEQ3.
[00:07:30] There's also something in here like a custom threshold.
[00:07:34] I also explained this, I think, in a video.
[00:07:36] It's very easy.
[00:07:38] At the moment here, we have a very straight threshold line,
[00:07:42] and you can change the line here with the slope,
[00:07:44] and at the moment here, it's 3 dB bar octave,
[00:07:47] which is pink noise.
[00:07:48] You can go to 0 dB, which is white noise.
[00:07:51] So you can see you catch more low end frequencies.
[00:07:55] You basically tilt or skew here the visualizer
[00:07:59] or the analyzer kind of.
[00:08:01] I usually have this at 3 dB per octave,
[00:08:04] which means the threshold is exactly in a straight line
[00:08:07] for 3 dB per octave or pink noise,
[00:08:09] and if I pull down the threshold,
[00:08:11] I kind of get a nice pink noise balance for the frequencies.
[00:08:16] You can also go up to 4.5 dB per octave,
[00:08:20] or I think it goes up to nine.
[00:08:22] If you only want to tame the upper frequencies
[00:08:25] and the base frequencies are never actually touched
[00:08:28] because it's so tilted.
[00:08:30] So I have this usually at 3 dB here, which is okay,
[00:08:35] but you can also go and use a custom curve.
[00:08:38] So here in the background, you can hear
[00:08:40] there's a track playing, right?
[00:08:42] And I can say, oh, I really like this distribution
[00:08:46] of the frequencies.
[00:08:47] I really like how it sounds.
[00:08:49] So you can analyze this here with a custom threshold.
[00:08:53] It just recorded for a moment.
[00:08:55] And when you're done, after a while, I don't know,
[00:09:06] you just have a new custom threshold here.
[00:09:09] You can also save this as a preset.
[00:09:11] But now we have to use here a slope of zero dB
[00:09:15] because we have a custom curve
[00:09:17] and we enable here the custom curve.
[00:09:18] You can see it drastically or heavily reduces here
[00:09:23] the volume or the frequencies.
[00:09:26] So to use this custom curve,
[00:09:28] we have to go up to 30 dB per octave.
[00:09:30] You have to use a slope here
[00:09:32] and we have to enable the custom curve.
[00:09:34] And now we have here, instead of the straight line
[00:09:37] of 3 dB per octave, we have basically
[00:09:39] the frequency distribution of the track
[00:09:42] we are currently rocking on.
[00:09:44] And we just pull this down slightly here
[00:09:47] and we make sure that every frequency
[00:09:50] is basically aligned with this curve.
[00:09:52] We just analyzed.
[00:09:53] We can also just analyze a different track,
[00:09:56] a different master track, for instance,
[00:09:59] and then see what's going on.
[00:10:01] And this is also something I do with DS EQ 3 a lot.
[00:10:05] I don't use it for resonance reduction all the time.
[00:10:10] I sometimes just see or look
[00:10:14] what the spectral compressor here is doing, right?
[00:10:17] I pull this down and I see there's a lot of activity here.
[00:10:22] Or here and then I know, oh, there's maybe too much content
[00:10:26] in this range or in this frequency area.
[00:10:30] And instead of just having this on the master
[00:10:32] and letting this work very hardly
[00:10:35] and very in a very hard way,
[00:10:39] I just go to the bus or to the individual instrument
[00:10:42] and just pull it down until it looks nice to my eyes here.
[00:10:46] And it sounds nice to me.
[00:10:47] Of course, that's the most important thing,
[00:10:49] how it sounds, right?
[00:10:50] And then I pull down the individual instruments
[00:10:52] or buses or whatever, and then I just remove this.
[00:10:56] I don't use it at all.
[00:10:57] I just use this basically as a visualizer
[00:11:01] or some type of analyzer to see what's going on
[00:11:05] actually in my music.
[00:11:07] So this is how I use the DS EQ 3 here.
[00:11:10] The custom curve is not something I use all the time.
[00:11:13] Mostly I just leave it here on 3 dB per octave,
[00:11:17] 3 dB or at pink noise, have a very slow attack,
[00:11:22] very slow release and then pull this slowly down
[00:11:26] and see what's going on.
[00:11:28] But here you can see my mix down is pretty flat already.
[00:11:33] So it tries to take down here every frequency
[00:11:38] in the kind of in the same way.
[00:11:39] So for me, this is pretty fine.
[00:11:42] I probably don't need to use a spectral compressor
[00:11:44] here at all.
[00:11:45] So yeah, that's what I can see at least here for this thing.
[00:11:51] So my mix down is pretty flat already.
[00:11:53] So this one had a lot of features already
[00:11:58] that you don't have in this one here.
[00:12:00] So this one is free, but it's also pretty raw
[00:12:03] and it doesn't lack some features.
[00:12:07] So I use this most of the times only to compress
[00:12:11] or to side chain my bass bass with the drums.
[00:12:16] Like I showed you in my last video,
[00:12:20] I don't use the spectral compressor on the master at all
[00:12:24] because it lacks this kind of selectivity feature here.
[00:12:27] So when I pull down here the global threshold,
[00:12:30] it tries to reduce all the little frequency bins
[00:12:36] individually, which makes it sound very spectral
[00:12:40] on digital very fast, in my opinion.
[00:12:43] So we can't group certain frequencies together.
[00:12:47] It always works on a per bin base, this.
[00:12:52] Which is not something I really like.
[00:12:56] But here you can also kind of low cut here the analyzer
[00:13:02] by using here where is it high frequency roll off.
[00:13:07] Or you can also make, you only can make a roll off here
[00:13:10] at the top end, but the low end is missing.
[00:13:13] So you can't take out here the bass.
[00:13:15] You can play around here with the threshold slope
[00:13:18] and with the curve, right?
[00:13:20] We can do something like this,
[00:13:23] but you can't really do here some individual things
[00:13:27] where you enable your certain bands and say,
[00:13:29] I want to reduce here some frequencies more than here
[00:13:32] and so on.
[00:13:33] This is not possible here.
[00:13:35] We have just a straight line and you can bend the straight line
[00:13:39] and that's more or less it can also change it this.
[00:13:42] So we can say, oh, only reduce the top end,
[00:13:45] take the low end out.
[00:13:47] This is possible,
[00:13:48] but you have to walk around certain problems here.
[00:13:50] Let's go back here to 3DB,
[00:13:54] which is also kind of pink noise.
[00:13:56] So I like to have the 3DB thing here
[00:13:58] just to see what's going on.
[00:14:00] Here it's more like a compressor.
[00:14:04] We have also upwards compression,
[00:14:06] which is kind of missing here.
[00:14:07] There is no upwards compression.
[00:14:09] So this is, I tried to use this on drums
[00:14:13] with upwards compression.
[00:14:15] You can see here it's trying to pull up some frequencies.
[00:14:18] I have to switch it on.
[00:14:24] But it doesn't sound good, right?
[00:14:31] It sounds very distorted
[00:14:33] 'cause it tries to push up all the individual frequencies.
[00:14:37] You can reduce the frequency bins here
[00:14:39] by using here the window size,
[00:14:42] but then you have more or less one bin
[00:14:45] for the frequency range from zero Hertz to 1K,
[00:14:49] one kilo Hertz,
[00:14:51] which is just too broad in my opinion.
[00:14:56] So you want to at least have here 2K.
[00:15:02] Let's reduce this here a bit more.
[00:15:04] Right, this doesn't sound right.
[00:15:13] It sounds way too digital.
[00:15:14] So you have to be very, very, very carefully
[00:15:18] with the spectral compressor on the master
[00:15:20] if you want to use it there.
[00:15:22] But you can use it like in the same way
[00:15:25] as I use here the DSEQ3
[00:15:27] just to look for things that it wants to change.
[00:15:31] So let's go back here.
[00:15:35] Right, you can see I want to take away the bass,
[00:15:41] but this is pretty fine
[00:15:42] because this is a 3D beeper octave.
[00:15:45] I don't want to have my track at 3D beeper octave
[00:15:48] as a slope or as a frequency distribution.
[00:15:50] It's just a rough guide for me.
[00:15:52] And here having some bass and some tops in there
[00:15:56] is pretty fine.
[00:15:57] I want to have this kind of smiley curve.
[00:16:00] I don't want to have a flat straight line for 3D beeper octave.
[00:16:03] So I guess I could dial in here something like a curve,
[00:16:08] something like this.
[00:16:09] But in my opinion, it's not versatile enough
[00:16:13] here, this threshold curve.
[00:16:15] So I use it more like an indicator or an analyzer
[00:16:19] and I use it mostly on drums, if at all.
[00:16:22] But my main use case for this
[00:16:26] is actually only side chaining things.
[00:16:30] I can show you how this sounds here on the drum bus
[00:16:35] here for a moment.
[00:16:36] Do I have it here on here?
[00:16:39] I have this EQ on the drums,
[00:16:41] just reducing slightly stuff, as you can see.
[00:16:44] So let's mute the drums or solo the drums here.
[00:16:49] So let's put here the spectral compressor on it.
[00:16:59] So what we can do here is we can use upwards compression
[00:17:02] that sounds a bit like OTT.
[00:17:03] But I would also say it doesn't sound natural.
[00:17:20] It sounds very digital and you have to be very carefully
[00:17:24] with using this.
[00:17:27] In my use, I try to use this on drums multiple times,
[00:17:30] but it always sounds so distorted
[00:17:32] and so artificial in a way.
[00:17:36] Maybe you can recommend how to use it on drums,
[00:17:39] but I never found a way to actually make it work
[00:17:42] for me on drums and sound great.
[00:17:45] I always have this kind of noisy sound to it.
[00:17:47] Maybe in a very subtle way.
[00:17:55] (upbeat music)
[00:17:57] And we leave some transients through.
[00:18:06] (upbeat music)
[00:18:09] And to me, it sounds always better without spec.
[00:18:25] So I fiddle around with this all the time
[00:18:28] and try to use it on drums, right?
[00:18:30] Just to see if I actually miss something,
[00:18:33] but when I'm done with fiddling with this compressor
[00:18:36] and I just mute it or disable it,
[00:18:38] it always sounds better to me.
[00:18:40] So maybe this is okay if you use very low ratios here
[00:18:46] for the drums,
[00:18:47] but if you use it drastically in this kind of way,
[00:18:52] it always sounds bad in my opinion.
[00:18:55] Yeah.
[00:18:58] Maybe if you, when you mix it,
[00:19:01] so mix in the dry signal here.
[00:19:04] Yeah, this could be something.
[00:19:09] So if you use it in parallel,
[00:19:22] this could be maybe worth a look if it works for you,
[00:19:27] but if you use it your 100% and a lot of ratio
[00:19:30] for upwards compression, downwards compression,
[00:19:32] it's always sounds too artificial
[00:19:34] because you have, like I said,
[00:19:36] all these individual bands measured and compressed
[00:19:39] and changed in volume and it doesn't sound right to me.
[00:19:42] So I don't use it on this type of things,
[00:19:48] but where I use it is here on the bass bus, right?
[00:19:52] Like in my last video.
[00:19:58] The drums coming in with sidechain compression here
[00:20:05] and then ducking basically the drum bus to the bass bus
[00:20:09] and it reduces here for the kick drum, the bass, the sub,
[00:20:12] and for the snare drum, which is just a clap
[00:20:15] or an white noise burst here at the top end from the bass.
[00:20:20] So that's how I use it usually.
[00:20:24] And also here, if you just want to reduce the bass,
[00:20:27] you just have to use a different slope here,
[00:20:29] something like this,
[00:20:30] and then you have to change here the threshold.
[00:20:33] So it's a bit off, a bit fiddly here, but it works.
[00:20:41] So let's go back here to my initial thing, 3dB.
[00:20:46] Something like this.
[00:20:49] And here you can see I have pretty fast release time.
[00:21:03] It's almost audio rate because I really want to only
[00:21:08] get the kick out of the bass more or less,
[00:21:10] also attack is here, zero MS, which is very fast.
[00:21:15] And it works for me, it sounds okay.
[00:21:18] So it doesn't change the sound too much.
[00:21:28] It just really removes the bass or the kick frequencies
[00:21:32] from the bass frequencies when they occur.
[00:21:35] So that's how I use the spectral compressor most of the times.
[00:21:40] Like I said, I try to use it on drums sometimes.
[00:21:45] Maybe as a style, if you like the style
[00:21:48] of having it sound very digital and very dubstabby
[00:21:52] or whatever, then it can be something.
[00:21:56] I also try to use it on a mid-range basis
[00:21:59] on these type of neuro bass sounds.
[00:22:01] And it also can be useful there
[00:22:04] if you just want to push up
[00:22:05] or upwards compress the bass sounds with this.
[00:22:10] But yeah, it has a certain sound to it.
[00:22:12] Then we have here in, on the master,
[00:22:18] we have here the spec craft.
[00:22:20] So this one is kind of a middle ground.
[00:22:24] So it kind of works like a compressor
[00:22:26] because we have here a real ratio setting
[00:22:29] even though it's also in percentage.
[00:22:32] We have here attack times, release times in milliseconds.
[00:22:35] So we can say really here I'm working at 174 BPM
[00:22:40] and 160 note is probably around 88 milliseconds
[00:22:44] and one eighth note is 170 MS, right?
[00:22:48] You can really tweak in the release times here
[00:22:52] if you want to, you can also leave some attacks
[00:22:55] through some transients through.
[00:22:58] But here also we have something like a threshold.
[00:23:01] We can pull this down.
[00:23:03] And then we have here a cue and we have a ratio
[00:23:07] and I have to see why this is not working at the moment.
[00:23:11] The ratio is up.
[00:23:13] Maybe it's disabled.
[00:23:14] I don't know what I did there.
[00:23:18] Spec craft.
[00:23:20] Okay, so you have probably a reduced the range probably.
[00:23:27] So yeah, you can see it reduces already frequencies.
[00:23:29] We have also here a threshold.
[00:23:31] The threshold is I think also 3 dB per octave.
[00:23:36] I don't know if you can change this,
[00:23:37] but there is here something like profiler.
[00:23:41] You can record basically all the tracks
[00:23:43] and then you have a changed threshold curve.
[00:23:48] Let's capture this here for a moment.
[00:23:51] It makes no sense.
[00:23:52] I just capture more or less the same frequency curve
[00:23:56] of this track, but you can just put it on another track
[00:23:58] and then capture this thing.
[00:24:01] You can see the threshold changed more or less
[00:24:03] in a different curve and then you can pull it down
[00:24:05] and everything that goes above this line then gets pulled
[00:24:08] down.
[00:24:09] So yeah, this is possible here.
[00:24:13] The ratio also a bit lower.
[00:24:15] So we don't want to reduce too much.
[00:24:17] So here instead of having this, what's the name?
[00:24:22] This is Q, the selectivity here, right?
[00:24:26] Here it's called Q.
[00:24:28] So if you have this at 0%, you have more like broad,
[00:24:32] broad frequency changes.
[00:24:34] And if you have this all the way up to 100%,
[00:24:36] you have individual frequencies getting pulled down.
[00:24:39] So this is possible.
[00:24:42] But here they also added some adaptive compensations, right?
[00:24:45] So we have the dynamics and the idea here is
[00:24:48] when you reduce a lot of individual frequencies here, right?
[00:24:52] You also reduce kind of the overall gain
[00:24:56] of this frequency area, right?
[00:24:59] (upbeat music)
[00:25:02] Right, so the higher it's become quieter.
[00:25:09] You reduce, of course, a lot of individual frequencies,
[00:25:13] but it gets quieter.
[00:25:14] So here they have some adaptive things.
[00:25:17] So with dynamics, you can see here,
[00:25:20] they kind of want to add back in
[00:25:24] some broad EQ changes, right?
[00:25:27] So let's pull this all the way up.
[00:25:28] You can see here, so it reduces individual frequencies,
[00:25:33] but it pushes up broader changes.
[00:25:36] So it makes basically an upwards compression here
[00:25:40] with this, just to bring back the volume.
[00:25:43] And this is very helpful sometimes.
[00:25:47] And you can change here, of course,
[00:25:49] the dynamics, the form and treble.
[00:25:51] So you have a treble here, you add more top end.
[00:25:58] But again, you want to use this very in a very subtle way.
[00:26:02] It sounds very artificial, very fast.
[00:26:06] (upbeat music)
[00:26:09] (upbeat music)
[00:26:11] But I really like the idea of this one here,
[00:26:31] and I use it more and more in certain situations
[00:26:35] because it's so versatile
[00:26:39] that you can use this curve
[00:26:40] and you have this adaptive change with the DSEQ sometimes.
[00:26:44] If I reduce too much stuff here, right, in the top end,
[00:26:49] I have to add an EQ then here after DSEQ
[00:26:54] and say, oh, bring back actually here the top end a bit, right?
[00:26:59] So with Spectraft, you have this basically in one plug in.
[00:27:04] But it more or less works in the same way
[00:27:06] as all of the other things, it's just quality of life.
[00:27:09] And it has maybe a different sound to it.
[00:27:11] And it's also that you have here this profiling thing, right?
[00:27:15] You can see I already
[00:27:16] clone some curves from different productions
[00:27:21] just to pull this down and see
[00:27:24] where I have too much content in my mix down
[00:27:28] and then push it up and correct it on the bus
[00:27:31] or maybe on the individual instrument.
[00:27:34] So also here, I use this sometimes just as a visualizer
[00:27:37] to see what's going on instead of having this on the master
[00:27:40] and just rock heavily and reduce the gain
[00:27:44] of certain individual frequencies.
[00:27:46] So yeah, this is Spectraft.
[00:27:48] I think this is pretty expensive,
[00:27:51] 150 bucks or something like this.
[00:27:54] So you don't have to use it.
[00:27:56] It's just quality of life.
[00:27:57] It does some nice things.
[00:28:00] This one here is a bit cheaper.
[00:28:01] I'm not sure how much this is.
[00:28:04] And this other one here,
[00:28:08] the Spectra compressor is completely free and open source.
[00:28:12] And I think it's also the only one that works under Linux.
[00:28:17] But you have to be very carefully with this, right?
[00:28:20] It lacks some quality of life things.
[00:28:22] And you have to be aware that you really work
[00:28:24] on all these individual frequency bins all the time.
[00:28:29] And it makes it very harsh or digital very fast.
[00:28:33] And yeah, like I said in the beginning,
[00:28:36] really try to use this in subtle ways.
[00:28:38] You can destroy your music with this.
[00:28:40] I know a lot of people like to use Soothe
[00:28:44] on more or less everything.
[00:28:45] I watch sometimes you these dubstep videos,
[00:28:48] color-based producers, and they just pull down heavily
[00:28:51] and remove everything until everything's completely flat
[00:28:55] and digital.
[00:28:56] And it's also, I get it, it's the sound.
[00:28:59] It's the aesthetics of this kind of genre.
[00:29:02] But if you do other music, sometimes drum base here,
[00:29:06] you want to have some resonances, right?
[00:29:08] You want to have some dirt.
[00:29:10] You want to have some overlaps.
[00:29:11] You want to have these sounds glued together in a way.
[00:29:17] So if you overdo this,
[00:29:20] you make these sounds stand out transparent
[00:29:22] or you single out certain sounds
[00:29:25] and you miss basically the glue.
[00:29:27] So you want to have the dirt.
[00:29:29] The dirt makes the music interesting, in my opinion.
[00:29:32] And I get it, I was at this point also in my life,
[00:29:36] I thought, oh, nice.
[00:29:38] Now we have the spectral compressor.
[00:29:40] I just pull this down.
[00:29:41] I have my curve I want to have.
[00:29:42] I pull this down.
[00:29:44] Everything is, everything sounds fine.
[00:29:46] I don't need to mix my tunes anymore.
[00:29:49] I just have this on the master and call it day.
[00:29:52] Sadly, this is not how it works.
[00:29:54] If you have a nice mix down,
[00:29:57] if you have a nice well balanced mix down
[00:30:00] and you work on these individual tracks
[00:30:03] and single out certain frequencies,
[00:30:06] it always sounds better
[00:30:08] and it always sounds more punchy, in my opinion,
[00:30:13] than having this here on the master
[00:30:15] and just put a mask with the same settings
[00:30:20] on every frequency.
[00:30:21] It just doesn't sound right, in my opinion.
[00:30:24] So try to use these very carefully.
[00:30:27] If you produce color based, then I can't help you.
[00:30:32] That's your fate.
[00:30:34] Yeah, I don't want this anyone.
[00:30:37] It's just, you know, it's type, it's part of the sound.
[00:30:40] I get it.
[00:30:41] So yeah, this is more or less my video
[00:30:45] about these type of processes.
[00:30:48] I hope it helps in a way.
[00:30:51] I'm not sure.
[00:30:52] Let me know what you think.
[00:30:53] Do you use any of these compressors
[00:30:55] or have any experiences?
[00:30:57] Maybe I got something wrong and it's with you.
[00:31:00] Let me know in the comments down below.
[00:31:02] I am open for everything.
[00:31:03] If you insult me, I just delete the comment
[00:31:08] and call it a day, okay.
[00:31:10] Yeah, that's it.
[00:31:16] I want to work on this track here today.
[00:31:18] I just started this.
[00:31:20] So that's it for the day.
[00:31:22] Thanks for watching.
[00:31:23] Leave a like, leave a subscription.
[00:31:24] Let me know what you think.
[00:31:25] See you in the next video.