Click on any phrase to play the video from that point.
[Adobe TV Presents]
[Jason Levin]
[Short and Suite: On the Road with Jason and Karl]
Hi, I'm Jason Levin,
and welcome to this episode of Short and Suite.
Today, I'm going to talk to you about
working with 3rd party plug ins in Adobe Audition CS6.
Now while we have an amazing array of effects, compressor,
limiters, reverbs, EQs,
everything that you can really think of built in to Audition,
it's very common to use 3rd party VST and audio unit plug ins,
and I'm a big supporter of those.
There are so many companies that make them, and they can really just
give your music a completely different feel, a completely different vibe,
and it also allows you to just create new sounds,
new mixes, new masters
by implementing these plug ins with some of the stock effects and features
that we have built into Adobe Audition CS6.
And now, more so than ever,
we've got more support, not only for AU and VST,
but also VST3,
and it's very easy to install your plug ins,
organize them inside the application,
choose the ones that you want to work with,
and then just working with them in real time on your files.
So once you've installed whatever 3rd party plug ins you want
and there's many;
I happen to be a big fan of a lot of the Waves plug ins out there.
One of the panels that you need to become familiar with
is this one here called the Audio Plug-in Manager.
This is effectively where you're going to be able to see
everything that comes pre-installed
so for instance, if you've got any of the Apple video products,
you might actually see there's a whole bunch of audio filters
that you could actually be using in Audition if you wanted to.
Now I happen to have all these things turned off.
So one of the things is after you install your plug ins,
you're going to open up this dialogue; now when you launch Audition,
it's going to do a scan.
You can also just choose Scan for Plug Ins here.
So if some reason, it didn't find any of your plug ins,
you can open up this dialogue,
choose Scan for Plug Ins; it's going to find everything.
And here again is where you can enable or disable whatever it is that you've got running.
You can see I've got a whole series of Waves, multi-maximizer,
some of the SSL series plug ins.
Again, these are going to mimic classic analog SSL boards, EQs, and compression.
You can enable the one you want
and go ahead and click OK on that.
I'm going to cancel; I've already done it.
And once you've done that, they should basically just show up inside your menu here,
so you can see we've got a menu for AU,
VST, and VST3.
Now on my Mac, I typically just go to AU over here,
so if I've got a stereo mix-down file here,
I'm going to choose AU > Waves,
and let's go into one of my favorites,
so we've got the SSL compressor; this is the classic--
what is known as the 2-mix compressor model
that after the SSL 4,000 series.
So go ahead and choose that; now again,
we are in the Wave Form view,
which means that once we've added that effect,
we add it from the menu here,
we're simply applying it to the file.
If we actually want to use multiple effects and stack them,
like in the mastering process,
we're going to do that in the Effects rack.
So instead, I'll come over to the Effects rack,
go over to AU,
and choose my SSL comp.
Okay, now you can see it appears stacked in the rack.
And here we go.
So basically now, here's what it looks like.
Once again, you can see that we have presets.
Now, these are the presets that they ship with.
Now depending upon the 3rd party effect,
sometimes they might have their own--
their own presets and location for presets
inside the effect itself.
Whatever their standard presets are,
these are going to appear in the Preset menu here.
Similarly, any presets that you create,
which I'm going to build in a second, will show up in this Preset menu.
So this can get a little confusing;
again, there's no rhyme or reason here,
because it's different with every different vendor.
The bottom line is whatever they have as their standard presets
that should be visible to the operating system,
you're going to see them here inside the Preset menu.
So let's go ahead and play this back,
and I'm going to set this compressor a little bit.
I'm actually going to choose one of their presets,
which is the SSL Center Classic Compressor Preset,
then play this back, take a look, and listen.
[♪Sabi Sabi♪]
Okay, now that's from one of my newest songs called Sabi Sabi,
available now on iTunes.
So what you can see as I'm playing this back
is that the metering is very fast,
very responsive,
and if you're listening in headphones; again, the brilliance of these plug ins,
all these 3rd party ones, in the case of this specific SSL 4,000 G Series:
they just sound amazing.
The key for you, though, is that you can see how fast and amazing
the metering is in here,
so one of the great benefits of using 3rd party effects
is you can certain things, certain features
that we might not have in some of our effects right here.
So again, we can play that, we can play that back,
we can change that around.
If I want to create a preset,
I'm going to go ahead and choose Save Settings as a Preset.
I'll call that Jason SSL 2-mix comp,
click OK,
and now that preset is always available to me.
Again, it appears here.
It does not appear here;
these are their factor presets.
You can't change anything in this,
although this is also where you can open preset files specific to their filters here.
Again, this can change, this can be different with different effects vendors,
but the ones that you make show up here.
So again, we now got SSL on there.
Let's go ahead and choose another one.
Go down to Audio Units > Waves,
and let's maybe go into something like,
how about SSL Channel.
Go into Stereo.
Notice, by the way, they're separated out for Stereo and Mono.
Come into this one here.
Again, here is something where we have some very nice metering.
Let's go ahead and flip back here,
and now we've got the compressor and this other channel playing simultaneously.
Let's take a listen.
[♪♪]
Okay, now why that may sound strange to you--
what I was trying to do was show you that I'm selecting presets while it's playing,
and the metering having both of these effects on screen
is unbelievably fast, responsive, and real time.
It kind of makes you want to do that, right?
So, again, very fast, very effective
using AU plug ins on the Mac with Adobe Audition CS6.
You can stack any number of 3rd party plug ins
and our own native plug ins, if you so desire,
you can see anyone who is seeing this is going, "Wow, he's adding a lot of compression on there!"
Yes, lots of compression.
You wouldn't normally do that.
Just to make a point here, to show you how all of these can co-exist together,
you could also create a preset.
Let's say you have a combination of 3rd party and native ones,
and you want to just save one rack preset.
Here's where you can create the rack preset,
and again, those presets will show up inside the effects rack themselves.
Now that's just applying 3rd party presets, 3rd party effects
in the Wave Form view.
Of course, you also have the capabilities of working with them in the multi track,
and when you work with them on the multi track view,
you then have the option to use not only Track effects,
which you can see here,
but you also have Clip effects.
So if I wanted to apply a specific 3rd party or native effect to a clip,
you can do that in the Effects rack here,
and you can see we're currently on Clip effects,
so I can come up to something like this.
I have this Eddie Cramer Vocal Channel here.
Again, this is actually playing on a djembe track.
This might be a strange choice, but let's take a listen to that.
[♪♪]
Okay, so it's adding kind of a reverb and a delay to that,
and again, that's only appearing on the clip.
If I go over to Track Effects,
you can see that on the entire track,
I'm also running the SSL Channel Effect, as well.
And if you take a look at my mixer here,
what you're going to see--let me go ahead and shrink up some of these,
and I'll bring my faders back here.
You can see that inside this session,
I have--if we just start counting, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5--
and 8, 9, 10--12--15--20 through 206;
a whole series of effects.
You can see that some of them I've got locked down.
This is known as pre-render or track freezing.
Why do you do that? Well again, depending upon the system you're running,
once you start adding 10, 15, 20, 25
real time 24-bit audio effects,
obviously, that's hitting the CPU very, very hard.
So by simply clicking on this freeze or pre-render button,
this is basically going to pre-render the effect in the background
to free up CPU, better real time performance.
If you start getting clicks or crackles during play back,
pre-render or freeze the track or effect.
So even with all the stuff you're seeing here;
again, 20-some effects, some of them pre-rendered, some of them not;
if I go ahead and wind this back,
go into our Mixer here, hit Play.
Oh, I've got something soloed. Hold on. Sorry about that. Here we go.
[♪♪]
Okay, all of this playing together in real time on my laptop.
So not only do you have the flexibility of working with all these 3rd party effects and filters,
but you can use them in a wonderful, real time mixing environment
in conjunction with all the already present Audition effects
to give a really big, really professional,
really just amazing sound coming out of this application,
whether you're doing standard mixing, whether you're doing 5.1 creation,
whether you're doing any kind of mastering.
So that's a brief look at working with 3rd party plug ins
in Adobe Audition CS6.
Lots more to come up with, short and sweet;
specific tutorials to some of the more esoteric features in Adobe Audition CS6,
so stay tuned for that. We'll see you next time.
[Adobe TV Productions]
