How to use reference tracks witbout having to buy them?

[Starship Krupa]

IMO, the best reference tracks are the ones that I think sound the best.

Unless you're doing the near-impossible these days, which is inventing a whole new genre, there must be commercial tracks out there that sound good to you.

My favorite ways to acquire music these days are Bandcamp and CD. This is because I can rip CD's to FLAC, and Bandcamp allows download in FLAC format. Gotta have my lossless.

Personal product recommendations:

I use MCompare to referencing, which you can get right now for about $13 if you sign up for MeldaProduction's newsletter and use a referral code (PM me if you want one, we're not allowed to post them publicly).

If you go this route, for an extra $5 or you can also buy the "pro" upgrade for the MFreeFX bundle in the same purchase. 37 very useful plug-ins, not only FX but analysis and other utilities. You can use MAnalyzer to compare your overall tonal balance with commercial releases. Also fully-functional in the free versions, but the upgrade unlocks some nice (but not essential) features.

The sale is only on for another 5 days, but you can download and try MCompare for free if you want to see if it's worth the $13. Just do it quickly if you're interested.

[Duncan Stitt]

T Boog - my fave piano + acoustic guitar track in a band setting is 'Time Flies Either Way' by DAWES, from the 'Passwords' album. My understanding is that they hired a new keyboard player for that album. He's very tasty, plus he puts pads under virtually every song, which sort of makes their music float on a pillow of sound. And the mix is very neutral, not all bright and tinnny.

Notice in this mix, they put one acoustic guitar in the center and let the piano take the stereo spread. Works great on this song, but that doesn't mean it would work on yours.

My go-to piano for a busy mix is the Session Piano in the Roland JV1010. it's very blah by itself, but fits into a mix better than any of my "better" piano VIs. I dread the day when that box finally dies.

 

[Bill Phillips]

On 6/22/2024 at 1:22 PM, T Boog said:

Btw, I'm no computer wiz so I'm hoping there's a relatively straight forward(easy ?) method. Thanks!

 

If you have any of lZotope's mixing plugins or bundles, audiolens will capture the frequency profile of sections of audio from almost anywhere. I think you'll need one of iZotope's "mothership" products (Neutron, Nectar, Ozone, etc) to use it. 

Each of the mothtrships is a pretty sophisticated mixer channel. On the downside, they aren't cheap and they consume a lot of processing power. Also having significant OpenGL capacity in your GPU will probably improve performance. 

[T Boog]

1 hour ago, Bill Phillips said:

they aren't cheap and they consume a lot of processing power

Thanks Bill. I know Neutron 4 Elements is free right now(until July 8 I believe) and I think it has audiolens. But yeah, in a recent post here they were mentioning that the Izotope products are CPU intensive. 

Im prob still gonna give it a try but I'm not getting my hopes up cause Im working with a humble pc(i5 2nd gen, 3.10 ghz, 16 gb ram). 

I guess it's worth a try but I know the first time it starts popping & cracking... It's going bye bye. Great advice though ?

[Max Arwood]

I tried for years to copy Eq curves from songs I really liked. I bought something  from steinberg 15+ years ago. Since then I probably have 10+ others that I have tried.  Stand-alone s from way back to Harbal! Good luck finding one that would exactly match your song. This does not work. There are great alternatives. Mcompare and ADPT Metric AB.  Both have good and bad points about them 

 Melda = It’s best feature is silence till volume match. It’s great!  There are probably enough slots. Being able to mark songs to auto level each time you select them is a super nice feature (with a short silence). 

Metric AB = More song slots, filters to listen to high, middle, low Freq separately and compare. Easy selection of chorus, verse, bridge. It takes too long to match and you have to click the match every time. Layout is better. Lots of extra features!
 

I love Metric features, but auto Volume matching is very important.  Up to now computers can not do what your ear/brain can do. You can take either of these tools, load a song with a great snare in it, listen-compare. With moderate audio skills you can get very close to the that snare sound. (Excluding when there are serious masking problems.)

Do a trial on Metric AB. I think Melda has trials too. Let us know what you think.