mic's blog

I am hosting VSTs. I built a DAW. I want that DAW to handle VST gracefully. And I am learning – a bunch…

I am a music lover who studied math and started coding by chance. My work gravitated naturally towards digital signals and then audio DSP. I consider myself well versed in DSP, as I have designed, used, and sold DSP audio effects and guitar amp models. But I am not an engineer. I meet with some engineers who design tube guitar amps and, honestly, I have no idea what they are talking about. We have no common language.

Orinj version 8.0.0 is a beta release with several important changes and numerous other improvements.

New auxiliary channels

Auxiliary channels in Orinj version 8 are session tracks. They are shown as tracks in the session and allow all the controls that other tracks use, including effects and envelopes (automation).

Here are my most important mixing rules.

Take mixing one step at a time

Understand what you want to do and why you are doing it. If you a solving a problem in the mix, understand what that problem is. Take care of one thing at a time.

I just spent a day with a guitar track that had too much sustain and was dry and muddy. I got rid of the sustain, checked the mid to low end, added sizable reverb, and tried different panning. None of that worked. I realized that the only thing bothering me was a sustained ringing around 3.5 kHz. I added a slight EQ (/wiki/equalizer) notch around that frequency. This allowed a more interesting reverb. The sustain no longer bothered me, so compressors were not necessary. With the new reverb, the low end was not as much of an issue. I tried many things, until I understood that I only needed a slight EQ.

Version 7 of Orinj is out. As we do with every major version release, we have put out a beta release. Version 7 will replace version 6 when we are comfortable that it is a stable version.

VST (Steinberg's Virtual Studio Technology)

I am just about finished with a 12-song set. It took a couple of months. Others go through songs quickly – a 3-4 hours per song. Not me. I spend a couple of days per song. Why? It just takes that long. Check this out.

Matt did a good bit of work on one of my newest songs, a piece of which is below. Since it is always interesting how engineers approach songs, here are some of Matt's notes.

Last week I tested how a compressor would compute the amplitude of a wave if the wave had DC gain. The detected amplitude oscillated. The size of the oscillation itself was the amount of DC gain. That was not as important as it sounded, because the frequency of the oscillation was the frequency of the underlying wave – too fast for most compressors.