Good bye Pro Tools. We were in love until you showed me your true colors. You never opened up to me and gave me your true secrets. This is why we cant be together anymore because all you do is throw shade. Limiting me to 32 outputs because I don’t have the hardware that you like. Why can’t I have as many outputs for what ever hardware I have. Don’t you love me for me?

All jokes aside. I have seriously stopped using Pro Tools 2018 as my everyday mixing driver. I have the privilege of owning the Zen tour and Orion 32 + from antelope audio that has given me the capability of having 96 inputs and outputs. Im really getting into outboard gear so I thought of limitless possibilities when I first hooked up both interfaces and made an audio aggregate. Then pro tools comes along to put a limit on my imagination. You can only have 32 inputs and outputs in PT. Now at first I was ok with that, until pro tools 2018 didn’t allow me to route audio past the number 32. So remember i said I have 96 IO with the zen tour and orion 32 together. I wanted to have 32 outputs in total amongst that 96. So If I wanted to use channel 55 and 56 pro tools didn’t pass audio to those channels. It only passed audio to 1 to 32. I was furious, at this point I wanted to force this to work. So I looked into getting pro tools unlimited, and guess what! You can have 64 IO…… if you own avid gear. Ive already invested in antelope gear pro tools due to the amazing ADC, DAC as well as FPGA based plugins. What is so special about avid gear? Lets wrap this point up by saying I don’t like companies in engineering who force engineers to stay in hole, not allowing appropriate interaction with other engineering groups. If pro tools opens up there limit to 3rd party interfaces to us more than 32 IO Ill be very happy to get rid of my rant. Now Im using reaper.

Pro Tools is my first love, but Reaper is my best friend who always has my back. Reapers flexibility is beyond wild. If you are a hardware junky, using inserts in reaper is possible on any sequence of channels. With my antelope gear I can route anything anywhere doesn’t matter what. Reapers editing is mature not as developed as pro tools, but you can live with it. Mixing is really cool once to get to the know the ins and outs of routing sends and outputs. Same for recording, once you take the time to learn how to use it, its second nature. Now the biggest thing that has annoyed me with reaper is buggy plugins. I have couple of plugins that misbehave in a session and reaper skips my audio playback when it encounters a problem. This makes it hard to bounce sessions. So I have to painfully find the plugin that is causing problems for the skips to stop. Overall I like reaper. Now this might be my imagination or it might not be, but reaper seems to have more of the 3 dimensional feel when mixing through it. In pro tools i had to work to get that same feeling.

Lastly I have not completely stopped using pro tools. I still use it for recordings, just cause I am faster In PT than reaper for recordings. I don’t mind using different tools for different things. Reaper is good for mixing and pro tools is good for recording and editing in my mind right now. So as an engineer what tools work best for you ?

Let us know

Hunter

Outbox Sound LLC

Waves C6 vs Fabfilter Multiband Compressor Who Wins ?

If you are like me you are always looking to slap a multiband compressor (MB) on everything. Why? Because I can. Also to alter the sound to get exactly what I want. Let’s talk about some findings between Waves C6 MB plugin and Fabfilter MB from Fabfilter. These two plugins can make or break you, but you have to live on the edge of mixing to see what’s right for your style.

Waves C6 Multi-band features

Internal/external sidechain per band
Individual band Listen mode
Four crossover bands plus two floating bands
Dynamic EQ, compression and expansion
Double precision bit resolution processing

Fabfilter Multi-band features

Fully customizable per band: threshold, range, attack, release, output gain, ratio, variable knee, lookahead (up to 20 ms), variable stereo linking, mid- or side-only processing, external side chain input, triggering on a separate frequency range
Handles any form of dynamics processing, from highly transparent compression, limiting and expansion to pumping upward compression and punchy gating
Up to six processing bands, freely placed anywhere in the spectrum
Bands can be easily snapped together to form a traditional crossover system

User interface

Now... Waves has been around for a while, however when it comes on to user experience I have to give it to Fabfilter, their methods of control knobs makes the experience feel real and the real-time frequency analyzer helps when you are unsure about things. The wonderful thing is that it is quick and easy to conceptualize. Waves on the other hand, you have to really use this tool for a while for it to be quick. I find the plugin to be very cluttered and confusing at times.

Specific features:

Fabfilters dynamic EQ shapes can really get you the sound you want or something totally different. This is something that you could spend a lot of time on or just stick with the traditional crossover patterns. The thing that really helps Fabfilter MB is the side-chaining capabilities. Not only can you do external side chains but you can also do internal frequency side chain, where it allows you to pick a range of frequencies that triggers one of the 6 bands of compression or expansion. Mind you all six bands can have there own frequency side chain. Waves also has side chaining however it is just external, the flexibility of Fabfilter is just too good.

Price:

Fabfilter MB is $199 and Waves C6 is $299. So the choice is up to you.

Sum up:

Who wins in this battle ? Fabfilter MB wins for me. However you really need to look at these plugins as tools. I use waves C6 on my lead vocals for an excited sound (waves plugins has a color to them so beware), and I use Fabfilter MB on instruments tracks to get a well rounded, realistic/transparent and finished sound. When it comes on to burden on your computer, you can have quite a few instances of Fabfilter MB and Waves C6 is much more burdensome on system usage. Now as engineers you really really should not just take my word for it. Check out the links below and download a demo for both.

Waves:

https://www.waves.com/plugins/c6-multiband-compressor#reviews

Fabfilter:

https://www.fabfilter.com/products/pro-mb-multiband-compressor-plug-in

Brought to you by Justin Hunter from OutboxSound

Outbox Sound Let’s Think Together !

PS: this blog was written for individuals mixing in the box. Not individuals using Waves Rack or other live performance plugin systems for live mixing.

Pro Tools Vs Reaper

Fabfilter MB Vs. Waves C6