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TechMuze Podcast Ep 07 (Excerpt) Welcome to techmuze! a net cast designed to
educate and inspire your musical creativity through tech. both technology and technique.
Please visit techmuze.ca for sure to know more some more. Follow us all over the internet
at techmuzepodcast. And as always, enjoy the show. Good am and welcome to techmuze. this
is episode 7 of the show and I appreciate you stopping by for another listen. I hope
you guys are enjoying what im dishing out here and I am prepared to keep it coming as
long as I am able to. For those of you who have been stopping by techmuze.ca to read
the blog and to check out the video content that ive been posting up there, I appreciate
that. Youll probably notice that theres been a bit of a redesign to the site. Trying to
basically stream line things, make it a little cleaner and clearer so that you can access
the content with greater ease and hopefully that’s the impression that youre getting.
Give me some feed back on that, let me know how you think if you got some ideas. There’ll
be some changes in the near future as well because its still a work in progress but it
is what it is and I hope you enjoy it. I just wanna let everyone know please follow me on
twitter ive actually been pretty active on twitter lately and getting into it and having
a good time, talking with folks and getting some conversations flowing. You can find me
on twitter at techmuzepodcatstwitter.com/techmuzepodcast if you wanna get me there. That’s a great
way to get a little chitchat happening. The other thing actually on the enough on the
topic of social networking that ive been dabbling with is a new service out there called empire
avenue. And its more of a fun kind of you know just for giggles kind of social campaigning
I don’t even know exactly what you call it but basically you would sign up there and
based on your twitters status and your facebook status and linkedin and a few other social
media sites that you can connect to, you end up with a value. Its almost like stock trading.
Its difficult to explain, you need to check it out. But youll find techmuze there and
you know I have a stock value of x or whatever it is and you can buys shares in techmuze
and you can sell them. Its not with real money, its more of a game. Its with a virtual currency
that they call eves and its kind of neat. You can join communities, you can link out
with folks, you can buy and sell your friends and like I say its just to shoot some giggles
as they say. So check them out its called empire avenue and you can buy shares in techmuze
if you want for virtual currency. So see what you think of that, its brand new we’ll see
how it goes. The other thing I wanted to bring up is if you visit techmuze.ca which I hope
you do of course. Youll notice on the right hand side of the screen I added the donate
botton. This is just you know I figured if you don’t ask you don’t get so if youre
interested in the content that im giving out here and you find that it adds value in some
fashion or another to what you do, of course the content is and will always remain free
that’s not going to change. Im not gonna start charging for any of this stuff because
I don’t think it’s the right thing to do. But if you do wanna help to sort of defray
the cost of running the websites and the time involve in producing the podcasts and the
video content on techmuze tv. Feel free to donate! A dollar, 10 dollars, a hundred dollars,
a thousand dollars, a million if you’ve got it, it all adds up as far as im concerned.
So I just wanna bring it to your attention and of course thank you in advance. A real
quick for techmuze today, I just wanna bring to your attention the fact that the universal
audio and their uad dsp power plugin suite, they added a new plugin that im actually really
excited to try out. It’s the lexicon 224 digital reverb. for those of you in the know
youll probably be aware that lexicon probably holds the greatest reputation when it comes
to reverb and special type effects and be an effects like that. They’ve been doing
it for years, their algorithims are you know unparallel in the industry. And some of the
more classic things of course now in general are being brought up as plugins. And so this
is just another one to add to the sort of the a vintage hardware turned to software
sort of trend that seems to be happening nowadays that ive spoken about in the past. If you
guys aren’t familiar with uad or universal audio in general, you should definitely check
them out. Ive got in my dah pc, my production machine, ive got actually 3 uad cards, pc
I cards installed. And that allows me to have more dsp power because the uad plugins they
require a shark its like how do you explain it, it’s a dsp chip basically that runs
the plugins. They don’t run natively off your cpu like a lot of plugins do. Waves plugins
and things like that. Most plugins actually run natively which means they take the power
for their mathematical processing from your cpu, from the system. Which is fine, that’s
nothing wrong with that. But when you’ve got the dsp power, the dsp chips to power
the plugins, then you can end up running a bunch of plugins that actually have very little
impact on your system resources. So you end up with for all intense and purposes, a slightly
more powerful machine because of it when youre using those plugins. That’s an attractive
feature of the uad stuff but to be honest with you, the quality of the plugins themselves
are by far in my opinion are the best of the market. Between universal audios plugins and
waves plugins, I don’t think you know youll be wanting for anything else. Theres a couple
of you know niche plugins that I will talk about later on that are handy to have and
that add great value and quality to your mixes if you know how to use them correctly. But
in general, the dsp programmers over at universal audio are absolutely brilliant. And they model
some of the most sought after vintage gear on the market today and put it into plugin
form ata fraction of a cost and you know how I feel about that, weve spoken about that
before in previous episodes. So check out universal audio, check out the new lexicon
224 digital reverb and watch some of the videos as they have demonstrated these plugins in
action. And if you can, watch those videos in your studio. Like listen to the sound of
those videos in your mixing environment because then you get a very good idea as to what these
things do. If you listen to them in your little white apple earbuds, you know, nothing sounds
good on those and so you might not get a full appreciation for what these guys are doing.
Universal audio check them out. So actually, in techmuze today on the topic of plugins,
I kind of wanna to channel about some of the types of plugins that I find quite valuable
in my work flow and in the quality of my end result that im able to achieve. In particular,
I wanted to chat a little bit about saturation type plugins to improve your sound or to get
a different flavor out of your mixes. What do I mean about that? Saturation plugins basically
their goal is to emulate the sort of harmonic distortions and subtle. You can even go as
far as to call them inaccuracies that take place when you use analog gear. And again
ive spoken about this in the past. And I think that it adds a certain flavor that people
will find a appealing and warm and musical and pleasant. In the early days of digital,
digital was always sort of subtle with the everyone seemed to think it was too harsh
and clinical and to clean. People was not used to it. They were used to those scratchy
old cassette tapes that they picked one on the floor in the truck and you know slap it
in the cassette deck and crank it up to 11 and off you go. And theres a certain imperfection
that happens in analog that actually is kind of pleasing to the ears, kind of musical sounding
that doesn’t happen naturally in a digital environment. so theres a couple of plugins
in the market that have been designed to emulate that and to bring some of that warmth and
flavor and character back to your mixes into your digital environment. one in particular
that I used and have used for a long time, I use it almost every mix somewhere in the
mix, often in the drum bust. But it’s the psp vintage warmer. Psp is the company. I
believe they are a polish company if im not mistaken. Correct me on that, if you know
feel free to call me if im wrong. The vintage warmer, there is a vintage warmer 2 I believe,
it’s a current version. And what this plugin does is exactly that. You put it, its not
a night and day thing. And if youre kind of new to mixing and new to critical listening
in general, you might play with this plugins and kind of be asking yourselves what the
heck do they, is it actually doing because its not….