i ’m going to help you identify different types of achromatism how to really hear out for it i ’ve got plenitude of exemplifications and i want to deal with some audio myths and misconceptions about achromatism but most importantly i want to show you how to use achromatism in your composites and products to actually make them sound more so for a full list of motifs covered check the description but for now let’s just jump right into it achromatism is a veritably broad effect and it can be a deliberate and egregious effect similar as an overdriven guitar tone or a heavily distorted 808 bass sample but it’s also the more subtle side effect convinced by signal processing so nearly any circuit tube vid transistor or indeed plug-in has achromatism to a certain degree and it’s this analog style achromatism that i really want to concern myself with this videotape all of these terms you hear thrown around like warm thick silky delicate smooth these terms that you hear audio masterminds and also companies throwing out all the time in their marketing that’s the kind of achromatism i want to address in this videotape part of the appeal or seductiveness with achromatism is that as a lot of these bias are analog records made back in the good old days frequently sounded really sort of warm full punchy and thick and part of this is down to the fact that there was subtle achromatism on every single track in those mixes just naturally due to
the bias they were recorded on and mixed through but let’s get straight to some exemplifications so what actually is achromatism so it’s principally when redundant sound is convinced or added to your original signal and there’s two main types of achromatism or harmonious achromatism and these are indeed and odd harmonics this first illustration is extremely simple but it sets the root for the after exemplifications that will be a lot further musical so to start with i have a 100 hertz sine surge and this is what we ’re going to call our abecedarian so on its own it just looks and sounds like this and what i ’m going to do is induce indeed harmonics onto this signal and these will be indeed multiples From this 100 hertz, so 100 times 2,200 hertz times 4 400 hertz, etc.but now for the odd harmonics these are odd multiples of the original signal so in this case 100 times 3 times 5 7 9 and so on and these look and sound like this in both cases we ’re adding signal or notes that were n’t there preliminarily albeit at a slightly lower position and these were frequently pushed into the advanced frequentness in general the indeed harmonics tend to give a feeling of support and clarity and wholeness substantially because you ’re adding in that octave and
another octave above as well and adding the octave to the original sound kind of gives this feeling of support perhaps a subtle kind of feeling of doubling that original uh sound that you had whereas the odd harmonics surely added a lot further uproariousness i would say a lot of edge bite and kind of buzziness to the sound you had just a whole lot more high frequentness there now this is sort of general between indeed and odd harmonics both can sound excellent depending on what you ’re using them for it’s not that bone is better than the other but there's another content we've to address veritably snappily with this introductory illustration and that's that besides a many plugins and surge shapers nearly all plugins and clearly all analog tackle does n’t simply induce indeed or odd harmonics as numerous people believe all of these different bias and plug- sways have a different combination or distribution of these indeed
and odd harmonics depending on a lot of different factors so you may well have heard that tubes have only indeed harmonics and perhaps vid has only odd harmonics but this simply is n’t true it's true that certain bias favor certain harmonics indeed or odd but it’s so much further than just whether it’s got a tube in it whether there’s a bit of vid there from an engineering background it’s all to do with the topology of the circuit not just the tube or the vid it’s every single piece of line every capacitor especially the mills make a huge difference it’s just the general design of the circuitry and not just one element i ’ll bandy a little bit further about that latterly but the last content i need to introduce isnon-linearity ornon-linear geste which sounds confusing but trust me it’s not that bad so principally with any device that induces achromatism or deformation what you might anticipate is that at all situations of volume or gain that you feed into that device you ’d have exactly the same type of achromatism so the same distribution of indeed an odd harmonics and you just get more or less volume of them but this could n’t be further
from the verity what you actually see with nearly all of these bias and plugins is that if you feed a different quantum of volume into them or if you drive them else you get dramatic differences in the distributions of odd and indeed harmonics and the tone of the achromatism that’s generated so i've an illustration then with a tube emulation and you ’ll see that as i increase the quantum of drive there’s a big difference in the distribution of harmonics at some points it’s favoring those indeed harmonics also the odd also back to the indeed again so you really have to be careful of this and just remember that these bias
respond fully different to transients different quantities of signal so anyway let’s take a quick listen to thisnon-linear geste (Music) i know that a pure sine surge isn't a veritably musical way to represent achromatism but i really just wanted to keep it as simple as possible for those first three abecedarian points the indeed harmonics odd harmonics and also thenon-linear geste of these bias so if any of that’s confusing please you know just take a break come back to thisre-watch those sections i suppose it’s veritably important that you understand that before moving on moving on to some further fun exemplifications how do we actually hear this achromatism hear it in tracks set it in our own tracks and products and what type of achromatism do we indeed want to use at all because there’s so numerous different types first thing pop on some headphones especially mixing and learning headphones you extended high frequence response reference observers are great in a well- treated room but utmost of the time the subtle differences of achromatism are a little bit harder to set rightly on plant observers
whereas in headphones you can tend to hear if you ’re overstating it a little bit too much the coming step is to get your hands on a lot of different options for achromatism there’s tons of free plugins out there and stock bones you need to witness a lot of these different plugins it’s one of these goods where there's no kind of wrong or right plugin there’s just so numerous of them and so numerous directors have tons of different analog gear and plugins especially for this purpose particular tools tend to fit veritably particular jobs the coming thing is once you ’ve got all these plugins if you ’re confused about what they ’re doing simply download this span analyzer plugin that i was using before in the videotape it’s a free plugin i ’ll link to my free plugins videotape in the description you can simply run a pure sine surge through it and also see what your plugin is doing what it’s converting it can just give you a little bit more data a little bit further information if you ’re unclear the coming thing you must do when you ’re using achromatism plugins or tackle is shoot in a good quantum of signal if you ’re you know transferring in-30 minus 40 db of signal you might actually not witness any achromatism with these draw- sways as i
explained before with thenon-linear geste some of these draw- sways do n’t indeed reply to anything until you give them minus 20 minus 10 db of gain going into trial with pushing up your gain going into the plugins make sure that you ’re maintaining really good gain staging and now into the illustration i ’m going to be adding some deformation to this barrel track but i ’ll play it clean just to start off with so it sounds okay but it's a little bit boring
