Make your incoming audio musically lo fi! Crush the sound and strip excess detail until what’s left is the true essence of the track. Or at least something that sounds like it came off a battered sampler from 1994.
Crush the bits to quantise amplitude the old fashioned way.
Crush the sample rate with Hold, parking on each sample until you’re ready for the next one (and quietly tanking your effective sample rate while you’re at it).
Push Intensity when you want the crush to bite harder, then blend with Dry Wet so you can keep a little dignity if you must.
Muteomatic is a plugin which monitors the transport of the DAW and mutes the audio on any combination of stop, play and record. The user wanted to have their talkback mic muted when recording and open when stopped. In addition, they wanted Dimmer to kick in and lower their speakers when the talkback mic was open in order to not feed back a collaborators voice out of the main speakers into the talkback mic.
Above is a demo setup. Muteomatic is placed on the talkback track and configured to mute on record and playback. Dimmer is placed on the main output track and configured to dim once the level of the sidechain (from the talkback track) exceeds -82dB. The transport is stopped, so Dimmer is active and Muteomatic is not.
Once you hit record, Muteomatic kicks in and mutes the talkback, triggering Dimmer to release and pass through the main output at full volume.
Same thing on playback.
Pro Tools was used as an example here, but Muteomatic and Dimmer work on all the common DAWs for Mac and Windows. Muteomatic is free and available with a Sound Radix account. You can see all of Sound Radix’s awesome work here.
If you do try this setup on Pro Tools, make sure to set the gain reduction meters to ‘summed’ like so:
If you have any other ideas for ways Dimmer or our other plugins could be used, let us know via the contact form or on our Discord.
If you want to get Dimmer working in Logic, you’ve come to the right place. A setup guide for Pro Tools is here. If you would like a setup guide for a different DAW/OS, please get in touch via the contact form.
I’ll be using a stripped-down recording session containing pretty much only what we need to demo the plugin. This example will be as if you are recording someone for a VO, but Dimmer can be used for other purposes too. You can get the session here.
The session contains the following tracks:
Talkback: The engineer’s mic input (aux track)
Talent: The mic input for recording (aux track)
Speaker Out: The submaster, which goes out to the speakers (aux track)
Record: Where the talent’s voice will be recorded to audio files (audio track)
Take tracks, where you might drop the recordings, ready to record the next take (audio tracks)
Stereo Out: the main output track to the speakers
I ran 2 different tones through the Talkback and Talent tracks so I could see what was going on.
Currently, if you have the talkback mic open, the talent will hear an echo of their voice coming out of the engineer’s speakers. So, let’s add Dimmer to Speaker Out in order to reduce that problem.
Dimmer opens up, with its four options (at the time of release), and the option for a Side Chain. This will be a bus from the talkback mic.
Next, we must make the sidechain. We open I/O Labels…
…and scroll down past inputs to see the buses available to us.
We’ll use Bus 4 for our Dimmer sidechain.
So, we make a send to our sidechain on our Talkback track.
So, our track layout looks like this. Logic has created an Aux track, which we do not need.
We delete the aux track and Logic prompts us that it is in use. Click ‘Delete anyway’.
Sends default to -inf dB so option-click the rotary fader to bring the send up to 0dB.
Reopen Dimmer so we can set its Side Chain input.
Select our nicely named bus in the Side Chain drop-down.
Now Dimmer is receiving the send from our Talkback track into its Side Chain input.
Once that is done, the indicator becomes functional and shows the amount of dimming happening – since we are running tone through our Talkback track, it is currently dimming, so the indicator is on.
To set the threshold of Dimmer, we can turn the tone off, open our talkback mic (don’t say anything yet!) and set the ‘Threshold’ to a little higher than the noise floor of the talkback mic.
The indicator will light up to show the Dimmer is being triggered, and the level of our main speakers will drop by the ‘dimming’ amount – 10dB shown above.
Once you’ve set that up, it’s probably useful to save a plugin preset that matches your talkback mic.
I use Dimmer to avoid echos and feedback loops, but you can use it whenever you want to duck any sound under another without the pumping effect of a compressor. For example, if you create podcasts or something with a similar ‘voice-over-music’ style, you can use Dimmer to duck the level of the music while you’re speaking.
And that’s it!
If you have any questions or comments, or want me to make a guide for your DAW, please get in touch via the contact form. If you want my Logic Pro X project, it’s here. If you want to try Dimmer, you can find it here.
If you want to get Dimmer working in Pro Tools, you’ve come to the right place. For the Logic Pro guide, look here. If you would like a setup guide for a different DAW/OS, please get in touch via the contact form.
I’ll be showing you the setup with Pro Tools on Mac, using a stripped-down recording session (also used for the video), containing pretty much only what we need to demo the plugin. This example will be as if you are recording someone for a VO, but Dimmer can be used for other purposes too. You can get the session here.
The session contains the following tracks:
Talkback: The engineer’s mic input
Talent Mic: The mic input for recording
Speaker Out: The master output to the speakers
Record: Where the talent’s voice will be recorded to audio files.
Take tracks, where you might drop the recordings, ready to record the next take.
Currently, if you have the talkback mic open, the talent will hear an echo of their voice coming out of the engineer’s speakers. So, let’s add Dimmer to Speaker Out in order to reduce that problem.
Dimmer opens up, with its four options (at the time of release), and the option for a ‘key input’. This will be a sidechain from the talkback mic.
Next, we must make the sidechain. We open I/O Setup and see our tidy bus layout containing just the three buses we are using.
We make a fourth bus for our sidechain.
And it appears in our list, currently unused.
We close the I/O Setup window and send our Talkback track to our new sidechain bus.
Unless you have changed your Pro Tools preferences, new sends default to silent.
So, we alt-click to set it to 0dB.
Then, we close the floating fader and our Pro Tools session looks like this.
We click on the ‘key input’ drop-down in the plugin window, and choose our sidechain bus as the ‘key input’ for Dimmer.
Once that is done, the indicator becomes functional and shows the amount of dimming happening – currently none, since our talkback mic is closed.
So, we open our talkback mic (don’t say anything yet!) and set the ‘Threshold’ to a little higher than the noise floor of the talkback mic.
The indicator will light up to show the Dimmer is being triggered, and the level of our main speakers will drop by the ‘dimming amount’ – 20dB here.
Once you’ve set that up, it’s probably useful to save a plugin preset that matches your talkback mic.
I use Dimmer to avoid echos and feedback loops, but you can use it whenever you want to duck any sound under another without the pumping effect of a compressor. For example, if you create podcasts or something with a similar ‘voice-over-music’ style, you can use Dimmer to duck the level of the music while you’re speaking.
And that’s it!
Here’s the whole process in a GIF:
If you have any questions or comments, or want me to make a guide for your DAW, please get in touch via the contact form. If you want my Pro Tools session, it’s here. If you want to try Dimmer, you can find it here.
If you want to get started with Viper, you have come to the right place! The following is a step-by-step of how to get a midi trigger working for Viper.
For the demo, I will be using a Pro Tools session on Mac, with a very artistic video I made of a screen saver. I will start in timecode view, grid mode and using the multitool.
First thing to do is to make a new track for Viper:
Viper must go on an instrument track in Pro Tools:
Here is our new instrument track:
Let’s give it a name.
Then we will add Viper to it.
Viper’s two windows appear. The plugin window lets you customize the wipe and the transparent window display it.
Let’s move the transparent window over the video:
…and move the plugin window out of the way of our track:
We’ll make a marker to show where we want our wipe to hit. We have left the wipe duration at 2 seconds so we’ll need to trigger the wipe 2 seconds before this marker.
Okay, here’s where we’re aiming for our actor to start speaking.
Let’s zoom in to create our wipe midi region.
To create our midi note, we’ll use the pencil tool:
…and we’ll change the track view to ‘notes’:
Using the pencil tool, we’ll draw any midi note of any length. Viper will be triggered by the start of the note only.
Now, we can go back to ‘clips’ view to sync up our new midi clip.
Because we have been working in grid mode, our note is nicely lined up to the frame. Now, we need to make the clip 2 seconds long. (Technically, the clip can be any length, as long as the note is 2 seconds before the end.)
We’ll go back to the multitool.
And we’ll cut our clip at the start of the midi note (key command: a).
If we select the clip, we see it is 1 second and 13 frames long. We want it to be 2 seconds long.
…so, we’ll change our selection to 2 seconds.
…and press enter.
We’ll consolidate our selection into a 2 second clip.
We now have our midi trigger clip, with a midi note which starts two seconds before the end of the clip.
It’s so beautiful, we’ll have to name it.
We’ll probably save this clip into our template, so this is nicer than ‘Viper-02’.
So now, we put our cursor where we want the wipe to hit – on our marker.
Then, we cmd + ctrl + click (using the hand tool) on our clip to align the end of it with the cursor.
Now we are ready to hit play and see our wipe in action.
We hit play and watch as the playhead passes over the midi note and starts the wipe. The two lines meet neatly on our marker and our actor starts to speak.
