The Envelope, Please...

rats

New member
Same problem as the "volume jumps at 1:55" thread. I've got spikes all over the place, and I want to try to go in and envelope the spike, and fix each one, but I'm not up on the process. The problem is that I record without any external compressor/limiter, or if I do use compression, it's my shitty stomp box compressor on my guitfiddle, and the twangs and thwaks are killng me here.

Camn: if you're there, you suggested this originally, how do you do it? It seems like it would be done in edit mode, although I can't find an envelope to put on "part" of the track. Does it involve highlighting the spike (?) in multitrack mode, then switching to edit mode, then selecting something(?)...transform(?):blablabla?......

And another thing: what are the little white dots connected by the lines in my track display when I click on the center line in multitrack mode? It's some type of envelope indicator, but I can't make sense of it.

The internal compression is definitely going to take some time for me to get used to, but that is an option I'm holding on to. For now I really need to kill these spikes.

Thanks in advance.
 
The center line's the panning line. Click on it and you get a little white square. Click and drag, and the panning line moves up or down, changing the position of the track in the stereo field. That's how you pan stuff in CEP.

Now for the part you're not gonna like. :D Get a compressor - it'll solve all sorts of problems. RNC make a good and cheap one.
 
hmmmmm...

I always tweak the pan in the track controls next to the volume controls. Seems to be a lot of ways to go about achieving the same result. Compressor, eh? I hate spending money. I guess I'll add to my list of things to get when I'm rich, along with my large diaphram condenser, my alesis reverb, my new soundcard, and finally getting my strat set-up. Maybe when I get my big raise in December!

For now I need to tame them spikes. Any ideas?
 
You're going to have to deal with compression, Rats. Just set your threshold higher, and it'll just "modify" those peaks (like a limiter), instead of the whole wave.

(by "higher," i mean make the threshold greater. shit. i mean more dB before it kicks in)
 
Kelly when you say set my threshold higher...ummmm....higher that what? Because I haven't figured out how to use this (CEP) compressor properly, and I don't want to fuck up my tracks, I have thereby opted to not use it until I know what I'm doing.

I've read Sonus and David's compressor articles, but it's a lot of mumbo jumbo to me unless I can apply it, and the only real compression (other than my shitty little stomp box) I have to work with is the CEP stuff in the transform opt in Edit. It's like a catch 22. If you cool edit people have any suggestions for making sense out of the compression options, please feel free to jump right in.

For example:
If I go into Transform/ amplitude/ dynamics processing,
I can choose from 4 preset compessions:
2:1 compressor <20dB
3:1 compressor <10dB
3:1 compressor >30dB
4:1 compressor >20dB

plus the preset vocal compressions that I won't go to.

I suppose if I had a basic understanding of what these (2:1 and <20dB, etc.) mean I would have somewhere to go with this. I've tried all four presets on the bass guitar and they all sounded like crap and didn't cure the spikes. I also tried the preset limiters to no avail.

Also the four tabs graphic, traditional, attack/release, and band limiting confuse things more for me. Do you need to use all four options and are they all applied to the current effect you are creating?

gracias.
 
P.S. I als can't stand the sound of overly compressed music, so I'm probably going to end up extremely anal about this whole issue.
 
Okay, for now, just mess with the "Traditional" tab-window. As you change values here, the "Graphical" line will change, but to see that, you'll need to press that tab. No biggie, you don't NEED to see it (folks who don't use CEP usually don't anyway, but this may help you understand compression a bit more... when you find the settings that work, you may notice a correlation between what you're doing to the dynamics and the graphic...)

Lets go back to your "spike." Go to the squiggly-line view and highlight an area that surrounds a given spike. Play it back repeatedly and see how loud that sucker gets, in terms of dB. Now, how loud do you WANT it to be (the peak, that is. we'll get to the shape later)? The DIFFERENCE between these two volumes is determined by the ratio and the threshold.

The RATIO will diminish this wave in the ratio designated, but it won't kick in until the volume has reached the THRESHOLD you designate. So while you're looking at your wave, imagine it "squashed" by a ratio of 2:1 (it would look EXACTLY the same as if you normalized it to 50%, had you previously normalized it to 100%). THAT's what it'd look like if the RATIO was 2:1 and the THRESHOLD was negative infinity. See, if there's any volume at all, then it's ABOVE negative whatever, and the RATIO is compressing all of the signal above that THRESHOLD (all of it).

Now, if you set the THRESHOLD at -50 dB (because CEP has a -100 dB range on it's graphic, I'll use that figure as "silence"), everything up to -50 dB will remain unchanged. However, the area ABOVE -50 dB will change at a ratio of 2:1. So, you're only processing wave information that exceeds -50 dB.

-50 dB is pretty quiet, so lets go further with this.

Let's set your THRESHOLD at -10 dB, which might be appropriate for your situation. If we set your RATIO to 2:1, then any sound ABOVE -10 dB will only add 1/2 of it's volume to the wave. Say your sound gets to, oh, -2 dB. There's an 8 dB difference between -10 and -2, so your peak would be "turned down" by 4 dB (8dB/2). Now your peaks are only -4 dB (half of the difference between the THRESHOLD and your peak).

Nothing's happened to any sound lower than -10 dB. NOTHING. But anything ABOVE -10 dB is being REDUCED in volume by half of the difference between your THRESHOLD and peak. At the MOST, provided you top out at 0 dB, your volume only diminishes 5 dB.

Does that make sense? I'm not sure how to explain it any other way...

Now, the art (and proper use) of this technique is figuring out the RATIO and THRESHOLD you want. I wish CEP would show the waves against a "dB" scale (it probably does, mine won't display it no matter how many times I "set" the scale to the right), then you'd be able to look and see what values you need for THRESHOLD. Because you only want to "squash" (compress) the "unruly" parts of your sound, which are those peaks you displayed earlier in another thread. In such a case, I'd experiment, listening to what the compression did at different settings.

Remember, NOTHING will be affected below the THRESHOLD. So try and figure that out first. Then try and figure out how little you can squash THAT before it sounds just plain fucked up.

BTW, that "graphic" view uses a straight 45* angle to denote no processing whatsoever (on the axis). The angle of the deviant "angle" is determined by the RATIO, and the point at which that "angle" deviates is determined by the THRESHOLD. I wouldn't mess with the bandwidth issues until you've played with compression a while; the only time I've used it is for mastering (and that was copying specs off of a radio-compressor so that I could hear that "radio sound" you probably hate. :D)

Here's a link to Sonusman and Shailat's compression page: http://www.geocities.com/shailat2000 . That'll help if you're still wondering...
 
ok, rats/

Step 1... go read Kellys post again. That was extremely informative and clear.

step 2...listen to those guys.. if you have a whole track that's out of control, you'll save a shitload of time using CEPs built in Dynamics processor (read: compressor) Fool around with the presets... see what it does.

Step 3: Back to envelopes.

There are 2 kinds getting tossed around here...

envelope #1)
The MULTITRACK volume and pan envelopes. When they are set to visible, the volume envelope is green an the pan envelope is blue. They are basically graphical representations of what you would be doing with a fader during traditional mixdown.
THEIR BEUATY is edit points. You can create an edit point by double clicking on the line. This allows you to make a volume or pan adjustment at any point in time, not EVERYWHERE on the track, like the TRACK volume and pan controls. This is a non-destructive process that you can constantly change as the project goes on.

example...
your pan envelope initially looks like this:
------------------------------------

but if you change it to this:
////////////////\///

then that track will "bounce" back and forth between left and right.

THESE ENVELOPES ARE THE COOLEST THING ABOUT MIXING ON A COMPUTER. You can get as anal as you like about panning and volume.


envelope#2)
Volume envelopes in the EDIT WAVEFORM veiw. These are a destructive form of editing a wave... which I use to deal with clicks and pops, if there are only a few.
Imagine a pop in a track... a great track that you love. You want it, but the pop is terrible. you dont want to compress it, cus that would effect the ENTIRE track, and only this one part sucks. You COULD hi-lite the pop and just reduce the volume... but that always seems to sound....abrupt. you want a gradual decrease followed by a gradual increase back to full volume after the pop. THIS is where you'd use this kind of envelope. It "fixes" the track... which you can then mix normally.

keep rockin!

xoxox
 
Wow Kelly, that was great! That was probably the simplest and most clear explanation I've run across yet, and exactly what I needed here. Actually last night I went in and did some experimenting and found using the normalize option in edit view applied to JUST the spike (zoomed way in) cured the spike with no noticeable loss of sound quality. However it seems like the concept of only effecting the portion of a wave that goes beyond the limits of reasonable levels would naturally seem to be a better solution provided it didn't destroy the wave form. That is something that seemed appealing about normalizing, that it didn't effect the shape of the selected wave, only the size.

Well I definitely have some tools to work with here, thanks. I'll let you know how it goes.

Camn: OK I think I see where you're going on the envelope thing, I'll have to look into this more. How do you manipulate the volume and pan envelopes in multitrack mode?

What does read:compressor mean? Can you be a little more specific? Also, as I stated in the original post, I have fooled around with the presets quite a bit and wasn't impressed with the results of anything.

Thanks dudelys!
 
"Because I haven't figured out how to use this (CEP) compressor properly, and I don't want to fuck up my tracks, I have thereby opted to not use it until I know what I'm doing."

Rats, why not go into Windows Explorer and create a folder for every song you record. If you do Blue Skies, for instance, call the folder Blue Skies Mix 1. Copy the original to the new folder. Then do all your experimenting on Blue Skies Mix 1, and don't mess with the original recording - just leave it on your hard disk to make copies from. Back it up, too. :D
 
right on kelly.

will have to look into that one dobro. I'm to the point of saying fuck it and barrelling in to those freaky effects and seeing what coagulates. I suppose it's the only way to figger it out. Like kelly says it's UNDO!
 
rats.. I was just pointing out that what most people call a COMPRESSOR is called "Dynamics processing" in other places. Dynamics processing involves compression, and its antithesis, expansion.

And you just create edit points and drag to manipulate those envelopes. You need to click the "view edit points" button, though... and create some edit points by double-clicking....

xoxo
 
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