SlewOnly / SubsOnly
TL:DW; Monitor through these plugs to hear only the highs, or only the subsonics, and adjust your mix accordingly. Also works as special effects.
By request, here’s my mix monitoring tools, for VST and Audio Unit, Mac and PC! Please remember, these like Guitar Conditioner are control-less plugins so you don’t operate them by opening their windows: they’re either on or off, which probably is shown in your DAW mixer window already.
SlewOnly gives you what it says on the tin: only the difference between samples, expressed as a sample. This produces a super-bright sound with zero latency and absolutely no pre-ring or post-ring. You can do two poles of this filtering: just add another SlewOnly. But, as is, this will give you an incredibly clear and transparent window on the ultra-highs, so you can dial in subtleties in the treble. Beware: don’t switch right back to the normal sound or it’ll sound incredibly dull. Rest your ears for a moment before resuming work.
SubsOnly does the same thing for subsonic bass. It sounds a little like a house party from an adjacent house. You can tweak sub-bass elements and really hear how they’re balancing against each other, and if you’re packing too much into the subs you’ll hear that as well. Get things thumping properly through SubsOnly and it should translate well to all manner of bassbins and subwoofers.
Lastly, these are calibrated (in SlewOnly quite literally: pink noise will be about the same amplitude with or without it, though the tone will be way different) so that you can switch them in and out, and expect roughly the same loudnesses. It’s okay if SubsOnly is louder for fullbodied bass: with that, it’s not so much about level-matching, it’s about getting your sound (at whatever desired loudness) and then having the bass still make sense through SubsOnly. If you’re madly overloading it, there won’t be groove, just a lot of thunder and noise, at elevated levels. These go on at the end of your master buss, so you can hear what your 2-buss chain did to the sound. Especially if you try and go for ‘commercially loud’ volumes, sanity checking with these tools can be a real silver bullet.
Like my other VST plugins, SlewOnly and SubsOnly are supported entirely by a Patreon. This is going to grow until it replaces the income I used to make by selling my plugins for money. I can’t justify charging musicians (many of whom aren’t earning money themselves) $50 a pop just to use my tools, so I’m in the process of porting everything I’ve ever made, to Mac/PC VST, and making it all free (even open source). Supporting the Patreon furthers that goal.
Fabulous! Thanks so much for these, and arriving on my birthday no less. Very much appreciate the video as well.
Voxengo’s SPAN is the be-all and end-all, but I should mention two other meters with “density view”: Reaper’s JS effect “Audio Statistics” and Blue Cat’s DP Meter.
Cheers, Charles
Many many thanks for the plugins, i have a problem with the SubsOnly plugin where it drives my CPU usage to well over 100% when idle (When the play button in my DAW is not pressed and the song is not playing) my DAW is Synapse Audio Orion (32 bit) and my operating system is Windows 7 64 bit, please can you fix this as i am loving the sound, kind regards, David.
Such an incredible tool for mixing. Love how loud subsonly is, makes it way easier to balance your low end
Just used SlewOnly to target the bitcrunchy parts of a u255-law sample, the DMX kick. Gave me spikes where the waveform changed a lot and I was able to widen those spikes with a lowpass filter, then straighten them out again with SlewOnly to remove the long ramps that formed between them, and was able to use this final smooth mapping of all the crunchy parts as a mask by amplitude modulating the original kick with the mask and a lowpassed copy of the kick with the inverted mask and then mixed them together and normalized. It sounded pretty good, especially after fading the transient back in and manually repairing some spots here and there where I didn’t manage to get things to add up perfectly.
https://mega.nz/#!04t2nCYI!hhJ1jpEusZf-j3HG6iXzHb-eE_IQkzQ7F8i8tRSSVyk
I don’t think this method will work well with more treble-oriented sounds, but I reckon I can use it to identify where things crunch against the floor and fake something there, maybe use the SlewOnly output as a mask to control where things are allowed to smear outward and blend into zero. Maybe by creating ramps forward and backward with filtering on the SlewOnly output and then stacking a lot of dithering on it, or just add in new noise at that point. Maybe noise EQ matched to the sample.