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Dynamix |
Know your gear This plug-in gives you the control over the amplitude of your sound. At the same time it's also able to boost up frequencies with the same algorythm. It's not a compressor, limiter, maximiser, or distortion effect. It was not created on the way of thinking of analogue sound designing and mastering processors, it's architecture is the result of a new way of thinking about sound. With Dynamix it takes only the turning of 4 knobs to reach the highest average RMS level of a sound, but mostly the best workflow is to load up one of the numerous presets, and tweak a maximum of 2 knobs to the right place in order to reach the sound you want. You can use more instances of Dynamix to get a multiband dynamic processor. To hear what Dynamix is able to do, please listen to the unprocessed and processed examples on the following links!
First look Take a look at Dynamix. It looks familiar to current digital Dynamix processors, but you can't find the regular parameters like 'threshold' or 'ratio'. Well... there's no threshold or ratio in this application. There are two new parameters called 'maximum size' and 'to'. This is not some kind of marketing trick, these parameters are not just renamed. This plugin is based on another idea. It's too hard to explain without hearing it, so we show and let you hear the most important things in the next few steps of this page.
Using Dynamix The GUI (Graphical User Interface) is easy to understand. It's not too big and not too small. All the settings are on the same screen. Setting the values of the knobs happens by the vertical movement of the mouse. Every knob can be fine tuned with the right mouse button, so you are always able to set the value you need. Step 01 - Sections of Dynamix Volume managing section There are 3 main sections in this software. The first section you can see from left to right is the volume managing section. It contains 3 knobs, called 'Input', 'Output', 'Dry/Wet'. -
With the 'Input'
knob you are able to change the volume of the incoming signal, and you
can also amplify it to make it twice as loud as the original signal.
Filter section The filter section contains five knobs and a button. With these knobs you can select the harmonics that have to be processed, and you can mix the unprocessed harmonics to the processed ones. There's also a nice stereo effect, which helps you create stereo sound, without panning it, so you can convert mono signals to stereo ones. The filter is a 12 db/oct 2 pole filter, which is the most popular filter for EQ-ing a signal. The filter can be set to Lowpass, Lowpass-Bandpass, Bandpass, Bandpass-Hipass and Hipass modes. -
The 'Freq'
knob sets the cutoff
frequency of the filter.
Main section This is the main section of this plug-in. This is where the magic happens. This part can work as a compressor, an expander, a maximiser or even as a distortion effect. What the parameters of this section are will be shown in the next part of the tutorial.
Step 02 - Reach the highest volume When you have done the mix you want, you may want to get it as loud as commercial productions. Until now you have had a lot of settings to do and had to learn pieces of software. Dynamix is able to make your track much louder than just normalising it. Dynamix can remove peaks without distortion and enlarge the level at the same time just like a good mastering limiter. All you have to do for this is to bypass the filter, leaving the input unchanged (Input: 1.0000, Output: 1.0000, Dry/Wet: 100% Wet) and then set the parameters of the main section like this:
This is the basic setting of volume maximising. To reach the highest volume, just turn the 'Maximum Size' parameter for higher levels. The 'To' parameter won't let the sound to go over 0db and all you will hear is that the volume raises itself far over the level of simple normalising, without hearing any distortion. But you must be aware that distortion can occour even in Dynamix, so you never want to set the 'Maximum Size' level too high. If you hear distortion, there definitely is some! It depends on your ears! If you set the 'To' parameter to 0.5000, then you will optimise your signal to -6db level. It's quite easy. In the following example you will hear a loop from a demo-song first unprocessed, then normalised and after processed, slowly fade-ing the 'Maximum size' knob from 0 to a much higher level where the normalised signal was.
Step 03 - Processing for sound designing Dynamix is a pretty creative tool. You can create a whole set of new sounds from your existing material. You can boost up frequencies or change the transients and all this in a very high quality. We will show you several examples with comments and we will also show the settings we used to reach that sound. Dynamix is able to boost up your sounds, if you feel, they need something but the sound you have is basically what you wanted. Let's take a look, what is Dynamix good for.
First you hear the clean unprocessed bass wave. Let's say, we need a bit more bass in it. We handle the problem by turning the filter bypass off and setting up the filter around 40-50 Hz. We give gain to this frequencys by turning the Maximum size slider for higher values. As we reach the sound we wanted, we can hear lots of distortion and clipping. To make the sound warmer, we turn the stereo knob slightly, to sound more stereo. To remove the unvanted clipping, we have to use another Dynamix instance with the same setting as by maximising the volume. We take the input signal back, till we hear no more clipping. The result is clean and bassfull. Dynamix is also great for processing drums.
The first Dynamix takes care of the basses. The bassdrum gets an extra kick. We set the filter to bandpass mode, and the cutoff to somewhere between 80 and 110 Hz, depending what kind of bassdrum we use. With the 'Maximum Size' knob we only need to make this frequncies louder. After this is done, we do the same with the high frequencies in a new instance of Dynamix. Now we have a kicking bass and punchy snares. Let's reduce the dynamic level to make the sound fit the best in your mix with the third instance. When this is done, your drums should sound as they are in the example. Sometimes you won't need these steps and sometimes you will need more instances to correct the level of other frequencies but in most cases these 3 should do it. Extreme settings are also welcome but in a musical way. Lets put one more instance of Dynamix before the 3 existing instances in the last example.
We made the sound a bit more electronic. To remove the dynamic of a track this way is good, for additive drumtracks and grooves. If the other 3 Dynamix instances were not used, the drums would sound like theye do in the next example.
Dynamix is also capable of distortion effects. With very, very low release and zero attack values you are able to reach almost any kind of distortion you want.  Listen
to a bassline loop tweaked with Dynamix.
(3,5 Mb) |
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(C) WWAYM 2005 |
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