iZotope's Tonal Balance Control 2

[Shane_B.]

Back in the 80's my brother and I recorded a silly little Christmas album to give to family and friends. His 4 Track machine died and I recently got a used one and he sent me the master tapes to see what I could do with the old tracks. I'm stuck using headphones right now so I figured I'd dive in to Ozone 9 Advanced and see what I could find to help with the mixing/mastering. Their Tonal Balance Control 2 VST is awesome. I've never nailed a mix and master so easily before in my life. I've only had to make like 2 or 3 trips out to the car to check and it's good. So far I haven't used anything else except for this, but it alone was worth the money I spent on O9A. What I learned was for some reason I always dip the 500 range, increase the 2K range, and dip the 10K range. It must be my aging ears. Basically I had to reverse that and it completely cleared up my mixes. I wouldn't think the 500 range would increase clarity but when I dipped the 2K range and raised the 10K range I got as close to professional recordings as I've ever gotten. I'm having a blast working on these old recordings. I'm chopping them up, adding lead parts, using Melodyne to add harmonies, fixing timing issues and bad notes. It's truly amazing what we can do with our DAW's and the joy it brings.

Ain't that a beautiful picture ...

[Doc H]

iZotope (Ozone 9 Advanced, Neutron 3, Nectar 3+, and RX 9) and Celemony (Melodyne Studio) have both been major part of my workflow for years. They wouldn’t have been if these weren’t required software at Berklee College of Music. Sometimes I have to be hit over the head before I use something. TBC has helped a lot in getting mixes near reference quickly. 

[Tony Carpenter]

It’s the one thing that keeps my mixes sane these days. My ears are long gone in high frequencies and my current room is not adequate yet. 

Edited December 10, 2021 by Tony Carpenter

[henkejs]

Do you use these plugins with Cakewalk? As usual, it's not listed as a supported host.

[Shane_B.]

1 hour ago, henkejs said:

Do you use these plugins with Cakewalk? As usual, it's not listed as a supported host.

I use S1 Pro 5 now but I just fired up CbB to try for you and it worked.

It was actually easier to see in CbB because the scaling on my 4K monitor in S1 makes TBC2 very small. I can adjust the size of the window, but the contents in the window are still hard to see. It also seemed to load a little faster in CbB, but I only tried 3 tracks. All Ozone plug-in's take forever to load on my system, but it seemed a tiny bit faster in CbB.

I loaded the O9A EQ on all three tracks, then loaded TBC2 on the Master. It connected with the EQ's on the tracks and it worked exactly like it does in S1. TBC2 does not allow you to pull up 3rd party VST's inside of TBC2 like it does other Ozone VST's. IOW it's not a limitation of CbB, it's just how it works on all DAW's. 

I just nailed a mix 1st try today. I don't know how I ever got by without this. I've had it on my system forever but never took the time to dive in to it until now. I have a lot of remastering to do.