Show 95 – Combfiltering and A New Mix Experiment

This week Jon discusses comb filtering and Ryan brings us a new experiment.

Download Show #095

Links:

Mix Experiment II

Variety Of Sound

Stillwell Audio

PhaseBug and SpinBug

Flux Bitter Sweet II

SPL

List of Freeware Plug-ins

11 thoughts on “Show 95 – Combfiltering and A New Mix Experiment

  1. Hi Jon,

    I read your article on comb filtering at your website. The graph demo above helped me visualize what’s going on. If I understand it correctly, should the graph be smooth without comb filtering? I’d love to get further explanation on how to interpret this… and do you use a spectrum analyzer?

    Maybe for a future HRS show, a primer on how to interpret graphs would be nice. Thanks!

    P.S. I tried to leave this comment on Audio Geek Zine but the CAPTCHA code was not showing up… maybe a browser problem but instead of trying to figure that out, I just decided to leave it here on HRS.

  2. Great show as usual guys.

    Just downloaded the tracks – I’m sitting on my hands waiting for a client to send me assets that are a week overdue (without the deadline changing for me of course…), so I’ll give it a spin.

    Ryan, you certainly chose the blandest sounds you could find, didn’t you? Is sound-replacement out of the question – we do it to drums all the time, but can I use something like Logic’s Audio-to-Score feature to interpret the audio of, say, the bass into MIDI information and replace that track, or is that out of the scope of this experiment?

    Jon – good segment on comb filtering. mgjr73 – it depends on the waveform you’re looking at, but yeah, typically, you’re aiming to NOT see the regular interval of notches in the frequency spectrum – that’s the telltale sign of comb filtering.

    • Use anything and everything to try and not make this thing suck. If you want to replace sounds, feel free to do so. I would not add any new performances to this just to keep it a controlled experiment. What I am trying to see is what we as engineers and producers can do to make something that comes in like this go back out as something usable. I want to hear all the details from everyone to hear what they had done and how they did it. I am sure that we will be able to learn a lot of little tricks from everyone who gives it a shot. Please send in a paragraph or two with all submissions that will be posted with the example.

  3. Hey guys, love the show. Well done!

    Ryan, my question specifically is about the mix experiment, kind on in line with what Dave just asked. Guess I’m not clear on the parameters of the experiment. Also, how about adding additional tracks?

    Thanks,

    Dan

  4. Special turd polishing plug-in enabled on the output bus.

    Alright, further clarification – would it be cheating to slice up or perhaps apply time stretching/compression to the audio tracks (I’ve got a swingin’ idea here…) or are you looking to see what can be done leaving the audio tracks intact?

    D

  5. Where do we upload the remixed tracks? I don’t see that above, and I don’t remember if you said anything about it on the podcast. Thanks-

  6. I can’t remember who said that : “sometimes the sound engineer best tool is the mute button”

    just kidding, but that’s a tough one !

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