Trackspacer by Wavesfactory: $29 @ Plugin Boutique

[MusicMan]

Trackspacer by Wavesfactory: $29 @ Plugin Boutique

https://www.pluginboutique.com/product/3-Studio-Tools/71-Dynamic-Processor/3259-Trackspacer

[Fleer]

Sweet little plugin

[MusicMan]

42 minutes ago, Fleer said:

Sweet little plugin

Agreed. I gave it a demo after their last 50% off sale had just ended. I wanted to try out some of the alternatives I already owned.

I decided this still had a place as it is quite light on CPU. They all alter the sound a little differently too, so sometimes it's good to try Sonible, this and iZotope on each source and see which works better.

[jngnz]

2 hours ago, MusicMan said:

Agreed. I gave it a demo after their last 50% off sale had just ended. I wanted to try out some of the alternatives I already owned.

I decided this still had a place as it is quite light on CPU. They all alter the sound a little differently too, so sometimes it's good to try Sonible, this and iZotope on each source and see which works better.

Sonible wins every time for me. But it’s likely more CPU heavy.

[charliex]

MautodynamicEq working perfect for me. I'll pass.

[Starship Krupa]

With sidechaining enabled, I take it? Tell me more about how you set it up.

As much as I my policy is usually "try to do it with my Meldaproduction FX first," there are exceptions, and Trackspacer is one of them.

I have every effect that Meldaproduction has ever made (also, eventually, ever will  make 😋), plus iZotope Music Production Suite 5, and nothing (so far) touches Trackspacer for fast, good-sounding results. Attractive, clean UI in standard mode, just the right amount of access to advanced parameters if you want.

It's so easy and quick it still feels like cheating after all these years. 😄

There are some plug-ins that are industry standards for good reason, and after demoing them, I ended up setting aside "I can do this with my existing collection of plug-ins." XLN's RC-20 is another one.

Edited August 1, 2023 by Starship Krupa

[charliex]

Yes, with side-chain enabled. I don't remember the exact configuration but it would take me 1min to achieve the goal. The "standards" are great, but there are some that are just hype. I was going to try sonible:comp2 but once I did the job with MAutoDynamicEq I closed protools and my wallet.

[charliex]

I repeat, it's a good plugin and the price is excellent, but if I can do exactly the same with what I already have I'm going to pass.

[TheSteven]

19 minutes ago, charliex said:

but if I can do exactly the same with what I already have I'm going to pass.

Key word is if... you can probably get close with MAutoDynamicEQ but not sure how close.

With MAutoDynamicEQ you can split the audio into up to 8 bands (as I recall),  Trackspacer has 32 bands.
I haven't A/B'd them to check and see if that really makes an audible difference or if one is more of a hassle to set up than the other. 

Here's a Chandler video on setting up MAutoDynamicEQ to do this kind of frequency masking with a couple of examples.
He's choosing to use only one band in his example which I think would have less than optimal results with material whose frequency spectrum varied over time or  if you were trying to use it with fitting vocals over a whole mix; but I haven't had a chance to try it yet.

Anyway... more information to complicate your buying decision.

[msmcleod]

Personally, I love this plugin.  

It's true that you can get the same results by doing everything yourself with EQ,  so it's not something I reach for often. But if you've tried EQ'ing yourself and you're still struggling trying to get something to fit in the mix, it can save you hours of tweaking.

[marcL]

3 hours ago, msmcleod said:

Personally, I love this plugin.  

It's true that you can get the same results by doing everything yourself with EQ,  so it's not something I reach for often. But if you've tried EQ'ing yourself and you're still struggling trying to get something to fit in the mix, it can save you hours of tweaking.

Though one thing one should not forget with all these automatic tools: If you want to handle the frequency clash of 2 tracks (e.g. Bass and Kick), then it is advisable first to reduce some frequencies of the sidechain track IMHO. Otherwise the sound of the target track is reduced too much! What I want to say: The man behind the mix still has to decide whether the bass or the kick should occupy the lowest frequencies!

[Nick Blanc]

2 minutes ago, MarcL said:

Though one thing one should not forget with all these automatic tools: If you want to handle the frequency clash of 2 tracks (e.g. Bass and Kick), then it is advisable first to reduce some frequencies of the sidechain track IMHO. Otherwise the sound of the target track is reduced too much! What I want to say: The man behind the mix still has to decide whether the bass or the kick should occupy the lowest frequencies!

*Deadmau5 rant mode on: kicks make kicks. Bass makes bass! 

[jude77]

16 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

With sidechaining enabled, I take it? Tell me more about how you set it up.

Setup is an absolute breeze.  You drop it on the track you want to duck.  Open the plugin and choose the track you want to drive the ducking from a drop down list then adjust the effect knob on Trackspacer until you get the sound you want.  Piece of cake!

[TheSteven]

@jude77 so in the situation where you want to drop a vocal on to mix...

Do you need to route the mix to a bus then apply the Trackspacer on that bus feeding to the Master Bus?
Or do you just drop it on the Master Bus?

[PavlovsCat]

You guys made a compelling case for me to get this last year and I still haven't tried it yet! This weekend I'll finally give it a shot. I was doing a search on how to set up sidechaining in Cakewalk (yes, I've never side chained before; please don't hold that against me!) and if anyone else here is in the same boat, this thread, while it's for Sonar, I'm guessing it will still be applicable to the latest version of Cakewalk: 

http://forum.cakewalk.com/Wavesfactory-Trackspacer-setup-in-Sonar-Platinum-m3470321.aspx

And then this video from Mike (Creative Sauce):
 

 

[Starship Krupa]

6 hours ago, jude77 said:

Setup is an absolute breeze.  You drop it on the track you want to duck.  Open the plugin and choose the track you want to drive the ducking from a drop down list then adjust the effect knob on Trackspacer until you get the sound you want.  Piece of cake!

I was inquiring about MAutoDynamicEQ, not Trackspacer.

5 hours ago, TheSteven said:

in the situation where you want to drop a vocal on to mix...

Do you need to route the mix to a bus then apply the Trackspacer on that bus feeding to the Master Bus?
Or do you just drop it on the Master Bus?

I've never used Trackspacer on a full mix; the more things you're ducking with it the more likely you are to hear it working, which you aren't supposed to.

The way I see its job is to reduce collisions between instruments rather than to carve out a space for one instrument in a full mix.

I use it on things like guitar vs. synths, where I have one or more synths that are stepping on the guitar(s). What I do in that situation is that (if I don't already have one) I create a bus for Synths. Then I insert Trackspacer in the FX Rack of the Synths bus. On the guitar track (or bus, depending), I create a send, with Trackspacer as the destination.

Then set the large center knob on Trackspacer for the amount of ducking I want. A good starting place is to apply it until I can hear the process of the synths being ducked, then back off a bit and finalize.

(that took way longer to type than it does to actually get Trackspacer set up)

14 hours ago, Nick Blanc said:

Deadmau5 rant mode on: kicks make kicks. Bass makes bass!

That is a fine concept for a mixer who can choose his bass and kick sounds from an endless menu before he starts trying to get them to fit together. For people who are working with "a 22-inch cylinder with a plastic membrane stretched across it, hit with a felt hammer operated by someone's foot, recorded with a microphone" vs. "a steel wire plucked by someone's finger exciting a magnetic transducer," there will more often be situations where the sounds will overlap and become indistinct.

If I'm creating a song from the ground up with complete control over what sounds I'm using (synthetic), I'll usually just pick and choose the source sounds so that they won't interfere with each other. I hadn't thought about it, but I guess my compositional brain kind of does that automatically. I imagine that Mr. Mau5 works the same way. In electronic genres, you can have way different kick and bass sounds on each song. If it's a rock song with guitar, bass, keys and drums, and the band have a signature sound they want to get across, it's a much different process.

Trackspacer is a problem solver. Of course it's best to avoid problems as far upstream as possible.

Edited August 2, 2023 by Starship Krupa

[Starship Krupa]

4 hours ago, PavlovsCat said:

was doing a search on how to set up sidechaining in Cakewalk (yes, I've never side chained before; please don't hold that against me!)

See my previous post. Dead simple, really.

Put the plug-in in the FX rack of the track that whose dynamics you want to control. Make a send on the track you want to do the controlling and choose the name of the plug-in as the destination.

Tuning it is more complicated. In the case of compression, the level of the send on the controlling track will affect how the plug-in works. Obviously, the harder you hit it, the more it's going to squash the target track. It's pretty much the same result as adjust the threshold control on the plug-in. I usually leave it at default and adjust it using the plug-in's threshold control.

[Nick Blanc]

13 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

That is a fine concept for a mixer who can choose his bass and kick sounds from an endless menu before he starts trying to get them to fit together. For people who are working with "a 22-inch cylinder with a plastic membrane stretched across it, hit with a felt hammer operated by someone's foot, recorded with a microphone" vs. "a steel wire plucked by someone's finger exciting a magnetic transducer," there will more often be situations where the sounds will overlap and become indistinct.

If I'm creating a song from the ground up with complete control over what sounds I'm using (synthetic), I'll usually just pick and choose the source sounds so that they won't interfere with each other. I hadn't thought about it, but I guess my compositional brain kind of does that automatically. I imagine that Mr. Mau5 works the same way. In electronic genres, you can have way different kick and bass sounds on each song. If it's a rock song with guitar, bass, keys and drums, and the band have a signature sound they want to get across, it's a much different process.

That's a colouful way to describe electronic versus acoustic 😆. Deadmau5 made this comment in regards to the concept of tuning your kicks. What followed was a minutes long rant how ridiculous the argument was. But it's a bit semantics. In an acoustic setting, the bassdrum produces kick and bass. So there is overlap and you (generally) want that deep punch from the bassdrum.

In electronic music, it very much depends on the genre. Techno also has that deep bassdrum, so the kick is often a deep thud with a lot of bass. I usually do sidechaining first and then Trackspacer to clean up. When doing more popular EDM, I regard the kick as just a transient. It should hit hard and cut through everything. Because the kiddo's have to hear it on their phone speakers. Trackspacer won't solve a lot in the low end there. But still pretty useful in the mids.

[dumbquestions]

I use a layered piano/pad live and use this in sidechain to duck the pad signal when the piano is triggered. Compressor could do the same thing but love the simplicity & transparency. I have the main trackspacer knob assigned to a knob on my midi controller to adjust the effect live as well if i want to go overboard with it. Love that you can select the affected frequency range easily as well