Adding punch to a track - Renaissance Compressor or C1 Compressor

Use an audio track with a good take from the artist. Any type of signal will do (vocal, guitars, etc.), although this trick works better on drum tracks. Duplicate the track onto another track. Open Renaissance Compressor or C1 Compressor on the duplicate track, and apply very heavy compression: Ratio 10:1, Threshold -30dB. These settings should make the compressor "pump." Blend this track in with the original track until you hear the "punch" of the duplicate track as it gets added to the original non-compressed track.

Blending early reflections and reverb tails

Love the sound of TrueVerb's simulated space but want to also have the smooth reverb tails of the Renaissance Reverb? Want to get the best of both worlds? For a single insert chain, place TrueVerb in the chain, followed immediately by Renaissance Reverb.

We'll set TrueVerb first, so bypass Renaissance Reverb for the time being. Load a preset you like or create your own. Turn the Reverb signal portion off by clicking the blue square at the bottom right-hand corner (next to the word Reverb). That way you are disabling True Verb's reverb tail section and using only the direct and early reflection signals.

Now, engage Renaissance Reverb by taking it out of bypass mode. Choose a preset or create a custom setting, and take the "early ref." slider all the way down to "off." Now, by adjusting the Renaissance Reverb Wet/Dry sliders, you control the blend of TrueVerb's rooms with Renaissance Reverb tails for a killer one-two punch! Experiment

Sound FX creation - Renaissance Bass and TrueVerb

Renaissance Bass is a great tool to fatten up all sorts of sounds - from thunder cues to gunshots, rumbles, and camera flashes. When setting your parameters, make sure that the frequency is not too high (40-55 hz works well for thunder cues).

TrueVerb is also a great tool for isolating a single sound effect from multiple ones. For example, take a church tower bell sound effect that has multiple bells. Take the one bell ring you want into peak, isolate the bell hit, and fade out the end. Put a long plate TrueVerb on the file, and the tail will be recreated perfectly.

Mastering loud mixes without the squashed flat tops - Linear Phase Multiband and L2

Here we'll use Linear Multiband and L2 to create a radio-friendly mix that doesn't look like a close-cropped, GI-style wave shape.

Place LinMB and L2 in the master chain - LinMB first, followed by L2. Load the "Adaptive Multi Electro Mastering" preset. Under the "Master" heading, you'll see control boxes with arrows. These controls globally affect all of the frequency bands. Grab the THRSH (Threshold) control and drag downwards. This lowers the thresholds across all frequency bands. When the animated DynamicLine begins to dance like a snake, you are beginning to apply compression. Stop when the DynamicLine is moving through about half of the total Range represented by the blue rectangle. Make note of any frequency bands that are really showing a lot of action. This indicates a lot of activity in the band, something which may be normal for the mix or which could indicate a frequency balance problem. Also notice if the lowest frequencies are very active. Either of these conditions may be normal, or they might suggest the mix balance could use some additional work.

Assuming all looks and sounds well, you can proceed to the L2. Grab the left Threshold slider, and drag it downward until you begin to see very slight activity on the ATTEN (attenuation) meter. Leave the slider at that position. Adjust the Out Ceiling slider to a ceiling of -0.1 dB to extra-guard overshoots (there are still playback systems around that display signal clipping when the signal is at 0.0dB). At this point, you should be hearing a very full mix, where most of the peak information is still intact.

Double taking - Super Tap Delay

Take a mono guitar or vocal track and run it through the SuperTap Delay with the original panned 45 degrees to the left and a very short delay panned 45 degrees to the right. You might add a little extra high-end boost on the delayed signal to help give it its own character.

The non-elegant version of doing this is to clone the track (and all its effects) and slide the clone in time. Using SuperTap Delay is much better and easier.

Adding life to a track

Mix in Enigma lightly to add spice and breathe more life into a track especially to sequenced tracks that have a boring, static sound such as synth tracks. For many tracks, adding Enigma might be excessive. However, sometimes adding up to 5% of this effect to the mix, though hardly perceptible as an effect, may still be audible and add extra movement or life. Enigma can help synthesized tracks sound more live, and you might consider using Enigma's atmosphere-enhancing qualities before going to any reverbs.

Fixing stereo microphone problems

This method requires you to use both the S1 MS Matrix plug-in in conjunction with the Q10 plug-in to compensate for one-point stereo microphone problems.

Most stereo one-point microphones suffer from reduced width in bass due to low frequency roll-offs in the directional microphone component characteristics. This may be corrected by boosting the S channel on the Q10 at 6dB per octave by using a low shelf set to +18 dB and sliding it in frequency to compensate. Normally, the frequency will be set to below 100 Hz; a setting between 16 and 50 Hz usually gives the best results. Similarly, dummy head (or Kunstkopf) recordings or spaced pair (identical) microphones pointing in the same direction (typical spacing of 15 to 50 cm) can be "Blumlein shuffled" by the same technique but using a higher boost frequency, say + 3dB at 300 Hz on the S channel, along with say a -1 dB shelf on the M channel to compensate for the resultant exaggerated bass. The channels may then be re-linked and the frequency slid up and down to adjust width or adjust for different microphone spacing.