Nicholas Toone

A few weeks ago I posted a small bit on Low End Tricks. One of those suggestions was to “Freeze/print tracks that are plugin heavy. In fact, freeze/print any track that has a set and forget plugin.”

I can confirm that this works fantastically.

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This is a picture of my music project binder:

The cover is a print out of this little note I made for myself in 2019 while I was in the midst of self inflicted mixing crisis. I no longer have the original note (or, rather, I have no idea where it’s hiding) but I still do my best to follow these simple rules when I’m working on a project.

• • • Use the DAW as if it were tape.
    • Don’t overthink, never over edit.
    • KNOW YOUR PARTS.
    • 350.0 Hz is ugly.
    • If possible, no more than 24 tracks.
    • No more than 4 plugins per track.
    • Serve the song at all times, and at all times serve the song.

While it’s impossible to adhere to all of these all the time; perfection is the enemy of the good and whatnot, this list has served me well especially working on older equipment.

Remember that less can be more and working with your limitations will always help see you to the end of whatever project you’re working on.

*Updated 10/15/2022 to include Linux Studio Plugins.

When I took a serious interest in recording instruments, I began hearing about something called IR’s and had to dig to find out what they were. I was a late bloomer it seems.

IR stands for Impulse Response. Essentially an IR is a recording of a sound (like a guitar) played though a speaker (cabinet) in a environment (ie: studio live room) through a specific microphone. The final recorded file is just a wav or an aif with wav being much more common.

You load up your IR file into an impulse response loader, which is added to a track that contains a DI guitar and an amp sim of some sort, and the IR mimics the sound of the cab/microphone/room that was recorded.

IR’s are a must have if you’re using straight up amp sims on your guitar tracks. Normally amp sims on their own don’t sound super great; they’re very dry and don’t have a ton of “character”. Stick an IR of, for example, a Fender Tweed Champ 58 on the track and you’ll notice a big difference right away.

IRs can also be used for reverb. Similar to the idea of capturing a sound of specific amp/mics/rooms, reverb impulses capture the ambiance of specific places be it a famous concert hall, the space under a bridge, or even a school hallway.

While there are a ton of IR loaders out there, both paid and free and, as with everything else, a good percentage of them are for Windows and/or Mac.¹

Fret not as there are Linux options, and they’re damn good.

Reaper supports IRs via its ReaVerb plugin and is pretty decent. I’ve been testing it out on a piece I’m working on and it seems to handle the job very well, as is pretty much expected from Reaper itself.

There is also the Linux Studio Plugins Impulse Responses and Impulse Reverb plugins. There is a mono and stereo version of each and they offer a little more tweaking capability than ReaVerb. I just started playing with these in Mixbus and so far so good.

The only issue I found with LSP is that it only supports wav. If you manage to find IRs that were created in aif, you’ll need to convert them using something like soundKonverter.

As an alternative to pure IR loaders, ToneLib GFX has an Impulse engine that allows you to add IRs directly into your amp/effects chain.

As for the IR files themselves, I have a pretty sizable IR library thanks to a few free packs:

• • • 7 Deadly Sins Impulse Pack. Absolutely huge amount of IR’s to go through. If you can think of a guitar cab, it’s probably here. I haven’t even scratched the surface of these.
    • Studio Nord Bremen. A good handful of really well done IR’s covering all the greats: Marshall, Ampeg, etc as well as a few very decent reverbs.
    • EchoThief. Reverb IRs taken from real spaces across North America.
    • Housecall – Lexicon 480L: A set of reverb IRs based on the Lexicon 480L. (Note: These are aif files and may not work in some IR loaders. You may need to convert them to wav depending on their use.)

You can also find both free and paid IR’s just by searching online. The IR files themselves are platform agnostic, so go nuts.

Is using IR’s cheating? No it’s not and don’t let anyone tell you any different.

Of course there are purists out there who think we should only be recording guitars through actual amps in actual good sounding rooms using actual microphones. While most of us would love a room of amps, cabs, and mics at our disposal, it’s important to note that most of us don’t have the money, or the space for that much gear.

For us regular people who want a great sound without breaking the bank, IR’s come in very handy for shaping guitar tones.

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^1: Have a gander at this list. Lots of good shit, but try and find anything that supports Linux.

Here is thirty seconds of my first, official, render from Linux.

Notes:

• • • Current hardware setup: Tascam US-16×08 into HP EliteBook 850 G3 running Fedora Jam 36.
    • Drums were recorded via Reaper on Windows the week before I started moving everything over to Linux. No processing was done to the drum tracks after the initial recording.
      • • Once I got Reaper running on Linux, I exported the raw stems and imported them into Mixbus 32c
        • Plugins used: ACE EQ and Compressor on the drum bus and the kick and snare tracks. All other drum tracks were mixed using only the inline Mixbus EQ and Compressor.
          • • Reverb bus 1: ACE Reverb.
            • Reverb bus 2: Gverb ( I think Gverb is included either in Mixbus or Fedora Jam. I do know it’s by Juhana Sadeharju and I can’t find anything on it other than this bit at RTcmix. No matter where it came from, it’s fantastic.)
    • Some guitars (base rhythm tracks and some melodies) were recorded via Reaper on Windows (DI run through GuitarRig 6 Player) before the move.
      • • Like the drums, the stems were exported and brought into Mixbus.
        • I kept the GuitarRig processing on these tracks because they sounded good, and I wanted to use them as a reference while I dug into ToneLib GFX.
    • Remaining guitar tracks (additional rhythm and melodies, bridge guitars) were recorded via Mixbus (DI straight into the Tascam) and run through ToneLib GFX.
    • Bass recorded via Reaper on Windows before the move.
      • • Bass was not a DI, it was recorded by micing the amp (Ampeg PF-350, TC Electronic BC212, SM-57).
        • No processing on it before the stem export.
        • Once in Mixbus, the tracks were touched up with ToneLib TubeWarmth and the Mixbus inline EQ.
    • Slight EQ, compression, and saturation on the master bus; no plugins, just the track controls.

All tracks that had plugins, especially guitar tracks with heavy hitters like ToneLib GFX, were frozen/printed to cut back on system resources.

The full song, music wise is finished and recorded. Lyrics were completed this past week and I’ll be laying down vocal tracks over the coming days.

It’s been well over year since I completed When Something Appears so it’s nice to get something done even if it’s just a single song.

Is there a hard and fast rule on what software you need to use? According to big tech, yes. There is only Windows or macOS! There is only Photoshop! There is only Office!

As Big Tech gets bigger and swallows up smaller companies, the landscape for software can seem pretty one dimensional and expensive unless you’re willing to do some digging and be skeptical about how you procure these products.

I’m already a little off the beaten path with software mainly because I loath the subscription model when it comes to applications. I don’t mind subscriptions for services such as music/video streaming or online storage; I subscribe to Spotify and Netflix (the originals!). I also have online storage and password manager accounts.

For apps though, I just don’t agree with the subscription model. I like to pay for an app and be done. Some subscriptions are kind of ok; Microsoft 365 is good because you get Mail (sans advertising), all the Office apps, and a terabyte of OneDrive ¹ storage for a decent yearly price so you’re getting a full package of stuff. Some are meh (Adobe), and some are downright awful (I’m looking straight at you, Pro Tools).

The bright side to all of this is that you can still  buy apps that are just as good, or often times better than the flagships.

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When recording and/or mixing music on lower end or older computers, the following tricks are important:

• • • When mixing, increase your buffer size to around 4096 or so depending on how many tracks you’re working with. It may need to go a little higher.
    • Freeze/print tracks that are plugin heavy. In fact, freeze/print any track that has a set and forget plugin.
    • If you need to record a last minute track (a vocal harmony or a little guitar weedly-doo) disable/mute everything but the bare minimum needed for reference and drop your buffer size as low as possible.
      • As an example of bare minimum: disable all drum tracks except the overheads and disable all guitar except the base rhythm tracks.