Underground

[Important:  Patreon rolled out a new Patron Manager, and it is monumentally bad.  I think I managed to successfully message everyone their rewards, but please let me know if you didn't receive them.  Thanks!]

Howdy!  I apologize for the prolonged absence (again).  This year has been tough for me mentally, but I think I’m finally ready to get back into the swing of making videos again.  I’ve just uploaded “Underground” from Yoshi’s Island, which contains a “Bonus Game” encore at the end of the video.  I decided not to distribute “Bonus Game” to stores since it was so short, so if you’d like to download it, you can do so down below!

Bonus Game FLAC/MP3:  https://www.mediafire.com/file/ukb8xpfghv7f5y8/BG.zip/file

And now onward with the update!

Suggestion Box

Firstly I just wanted to mention I’ve made some changes to how the Suggestion Box works.  The Suggestion Box was getting a bit cluttered, so I’ve altered the forms a bit to encourage more voting and less adding of new suggestions.  I’ve also increased the number of tracks that you can vote for if you choose to vote so that I can have more data to go by.  Here’s the way each tier works now:

• $1 Tier:  You may vote for up to 2 tracks
• $3 Tier:  You may either vote for up to 5 tracks, OR you may add a new suggestion to the list
• $5+ Tier:  You may either vote for up to 5 tracks (and each vote counts 2x), OR you may add a new suggestion to the list (which will start with a 2 point boost)

I tried hard to make sure that no one felt as though they were losing anything with this change, as all tiers are now actually able to vote for more tracks than they were under the previous system.  The only difference is that the $5+ Tier must now choose between voting and adding rather than being able to do both at once by splitting their credits, but this was done mostly to make sure that the forms were easy to understand and use.  As always, however, feel free to provide any feedback you might have!

Audio Plugins

For this update I thought I’d take some time to talk about audio plugins.  For as long as I’ve been making videos, I have for the most part only used free plugins in my audio projects.  In the past, this was because I couldn’t afford paid plugins, but eventually I got so stuck in the mindset of only using free plugins that I kinda forgot that paid plugins were an option.  So it wasn’t until recently that I decided to look around for some paid alternatives to the most common types of plugins I use, and after a lot of research and free trials I finally settled on a few.  I wanted to spend this update talking about Pro-Q 3, which is the plugin that impressed me the most, but for anyone who is interested in the other plugins I decided to purchase, here’s a list:

• Equalizer– FabFilter Pro-Q 3
• Compressor– FabFilter Pro-C 2
• Limiter – FabFilter Pro-L 2
• Reverb – Valhalla VintageVerb
• Delay – Valhalla Delay

Pro-Q 3

As I mentioned above, Pro-Q 3 has easily been the most valuable plugin out of all the plugins I purchased.  This is partly because I use an equalizer on literally every track in all of my projects, but it’s also just a very well designed plugin that makes achieving my desired results incredibly easy.  Everything from the location of the controls to the very thoughtfully designed mouse shortcuts makes sculpting the tone of my tracks a breeze.  The mouse shortcuts, in particular, have been one of my favorite features of the plugin.  Creating a high pass filter is as simple as double clicking and dragging from the left side of the spectrum to create a new band.  Similarly, I can single click and drag from the side to create a shelving filter.  Clicking and dragging anywhere in the center of the spectrum creates a regular EQ band.  The slope of any band can then be modified by mousing over the EQ band and rolling the mouse wheel up or down.  Creating new bands from a blank slate is so quick and easy that I have completely stopped using presets, as I no longer find them necessary.  But anyway, enough about the mouse shortcuts!  Here are a few other features of Pro-Q 3 that I’ve found to be very helpful.

Band Soloing:  My favorite feature of Pro-Q 3 has been the ability to quickly solo an EQ band by clicking and holding the headphone icon in the context menu.  This makes it very easy to hear what’s going on in each section of an instrument’s frequency spectrum by dragging the band from left to right, and it’s also very useful for hearing exactly what I’m cutting out when I use a high pass filter or shelving filters.  This is one of the most basic features of Pro-Q 3, but it’s something that was lacking in my default EQ plugin, and it’s been extremely useful to me.

Masking Detection and Dynamic EQ:  Another really great feature is the ability to overlay the spectrum of another instrument onto the one that I am currently editing in order to make EQ decisions a bit easier.  Using the pop-up menu at the bottom of the interface, I can easily view every other instance of Pro-Q 3 that I’ve loaded into my project, and the small previews highlight in red the areas where there might be some frequency masking problems.  In this example, I’ve overlayed the bass drum track (the red spectrum) onto the acoustic bass track (grey spectrum).  The bright red column indicates the area where there is a build up of the same frequencies between the two tracks.  Pro-Q 3 makes it easy to resolve problems like these by allowing me to load in the bass drum as a sidechain, which I can then use to trigger a dynamic EQ band in the problem area.  Now, every time the bass drum hits, the EQ band automatically carves out a deep cut for it in the acoustic bass track.  Otherwise, if the bass drum is not playing, the EQ band stays stationary.  This operates on a similar principal to sidechain compression, except with dynamic EQ, only specific frequencies are being tamed by the sidechain rather than the entire track.

Spectrum Grab:  Here’s another feature that I’ve found to be pretty useful.  When you mouse over the spectrum for a second or two, Pro-Q 3 will freeze the spectrum in purple, analyze the audio, and identify the parts of the sound that you might want to consider taming with EQ cuts.  You can then just click and drag one of the yellow dots at the top of the spectrum to quickly create a cut.  Honestly I kind of ignored this feature at first, because I was skeptical of how accurately it could detect the “bad parts” of the sound, but I decided to give this feature a chance recently, and I’ve been very impressed with how well it works.  At first I started using this feature to help me to pinpoint the areas of the sound that I already knew I wanted to cut, but recently I’ve also tried creating bands in the other recommended areas just to hear what’s going on in that part of the spectrum, and I’m surprised at how often Pro-Q 3 is able to detect weird resonances that I probably don’t want in my track.  I don’t always agree with the cuts that Pro-Q 3 suggests, but this feature is “right” often enough that I’ve started using it more frequently on tracks that I’m struggling to get a good sound out of.

EQ Match:  And here’s a feature that’s a little more abstract, but still pretty neat.  The EQ Match feature allows you to feed a reference track into Pro-Q 3, and then Pro-Q 3 will attempt to create an EQ curve that will match the sonic characteristics of your track to those of the reference.  This feature is probably intended to be used on an entire mix, but recently I tried using this on an individual track while I was experimenting with some double tracking.  I had a guitalele and a banjo that were both playing the same part, but were panned to different sides of the stereo image, and I used the EQ Match on the banjo track to match it to the tone of the ukulele.  Then I inverted all of the bands so that all the cuts became boosts and vice versa.  The idea was to carve the “ukulele tone” out of the banjo track in order to create more separation between the two tracks, and it ended up working pretty well.  I’ll definitely experiment with this more in the future when I have two tracks that are playing similar parts.

Keyboard Overlay:  And finally, here’s an “honorable mention” feature that may not be as technically impressive as the other features I’ve listed, but is still extremely helpful.  At the bottom left of the interface, I can click a little keyboard icon which pulls out a keyboard that spans across the entire spectrum.  Each key aligns with its corresponding frequency in the spectrum, which allows me to visualize things in terms of notes rather than Hertz.  This is useful for when a specific note is popping out a lot in a guitar track, for instance, as I can quickly find the note on the keyboard and place an EQ band in that area instead of having to sweep around or figure out the note’s value in Hertz.  And better yet, I can configure the band to be dynamic so that it only creates a cut when that specific note is playing.

And that about does it for my favorite Pro-Q 3 features!  One last thing I wanted to mention about these FabFilter plugins in general is how good they are at visually representing what the plugin is doing to the audio.  I’ve always been more of a visual learner, and these FabFilter interfaces have been amazing learning aids for me simply because they provide so much visual feedback.  I’ve always felt like I didn’t really know what I was doing and that I was just guessing at how to make things sound better, but this is the first time that I’ve felt like I was actually making informed decisions about how I am processing the audio.  I am, of course, still relying on my ears to make my decisions, but the visual feedback provided by these FabFilter plugins has really helped me to form a better understanding of how all of the various controls work.

Preview of Yoshi’s Tale (Work in Progress)

While I was working on Underground from Yoshi’s Island, I was reminded of the end credits theme from Yoshi’s Story, and it seemed like something that would lend itself well to the style of arrangement that I like to do, so I decided to take a stab at it.  The most challenging part was figuring out what to do for the Yoshi chorus at the end.  One of the first things I tried was recording some kazoos and then pitching them up an octave so they would be in the correct register.  Funnily enough, the kazoos sounded almost exactly like the Yoshi voices in the original track, but they also sounded kinda cheesy in comparison to the other instruments in the arrangement, so I decided to just use a chorus of noseflutes to strike a compromise between silly and serious sounding.  So here’s the link to the preview!  The recording is pretty much finished, I just need to mix it properly now.

https://soundcloud.com/user-789983357/yt-premix/s-r1dx89XxPns

And that’s it!  Thanks for reading, and thank you once again for your support and patience.  For the past several months, I’ve been spending some money on upgrading to paid versions of my most commonly used types of VSTs, which has made a huge improvement in my workflow, and I really don’t think I would have been able to make these upgrades without your support.  So thank you!  I hope you are all staying safe and doing well during this time.  Cheers!