Christ - I've got a blog. Not a month ago I was asking people what one was. I felt a bit like a 73-year old trying to sort out text-messaging. As we're all victims of the information age where we don't really need to remember anything anymore, I thought I'd start recording my thoughts and where better to do it than a blog on
www.musiceditor.co.uk
I've developed an unhealthy addiction to waves recently. I bought Waves diamond nearly a year ago now and I added the studio classics bundle to it recently having worked with a pop engineer who'd sung the praises of the API compressors. He'd been using API's lunchbox modular system and commented that the software 550A and 550B EQs along with the 2500 compressor did a remarkable job at emulating their hardware counterparts. I heard the comparison and had to agree.
Now the idea that we're archiving fabulous old bits of kit for posterity, like Jack Joseph Puig's unique Fairchild is a great one. In a similar idea, unrelated to waves, The Abbey Road Brilliance Pack emulates the EQ curves of proprietary boxes like the RS127 and is another example of this preservation - I must have a listen to these!
One little thing irritates me though. Waves claim that you can have the golden touch of the top producers and engineers washing over your mixes simply using their presets. Great names of the likes of Tony Maserati, Steve Lillywhite and mastering engineer Drew Levyne have added free presets for a lot of the waves range. Whilst some of these are great insights into what the fingers of these names may have done, there's rarely much background detail as to why the brains have told the fingers to do what they did! There is some background, particularly in an interview with Tony Maserati, but you have to dig around on the waves website for it.
To anyone who uses the many waves presets, particularly the 'celebrity' ones - please don't think that's its going to magically fix your kick drum or that you don't need to spend time on positioning that mic underneath the snare as you have so-and-so's EQ settings for the Puigtec, so it'll be great. Most of your customers, Waves, are a little smarter than that. A piano EQ curve that worked for Steve Lillywhite worked on that particular piano, in that particular room, with those partcular mics and that particular player through the studio's mic pres and their desk before being tweaked to someone else's taste.
Learn the fundamentals of EQ and compression and you'll find that you're making your own settings to fix the problem in YOUR track, not someone elses. Reverbs, delays and esoterics such as vocoder settings and the like are a different matter entirely.
Waves could fix this very simply by adding a section in the linked help files that explain the whys and wherefores of those presets. It would certainly help with the learning curve for newbies and experienced alike.
Tony
Labels: API, digidesign, music, musiceditor, plugins, presets, protools, waves
