 Hey, it's Anfa and you're watching Anfa Vlog and the previous video I have introduced you to Wolf Shaper, which is a free and open source distortion plug-in for Linux and Windows In this video, I'm going to show you how you can use it as a mixing tool. So let's begin All right, so here is my Ardor session First I'm gonna play parts of the track so you can understand what the sound is and what the mood is So it's a psychedelic trance track as you can hear now I'm going to go to this beginning of the session and well I'm just going to go through every single track in this project and try to use Wolf Shaper to enhance the sound So the first one is the kick. I'm going to isolate the kick Let's select all the regions that plays and loop it Now as you can see or hear rather the kick has a Lopez filter on it, which is automated Here it is So I'm going to bypass that for now It's gonna give us the full sound and That's gonna be easier to just you know do our work Because otherwise it will be changing all the time. So I've added Wolf Shaper here. Let's do it before The filter so that the filter will remove any extra harmonic content that we add with distortion Now let's just try I'm going to add a point and change this curve to drive it Sounds much more harsh or rather hard driven Let's see if I back it off to the dry signal Now Some of that is pretty nice I'm gonna try to match the input and output levels So when I bypass the plug-in, let's hear how loud it is It's louder after distortion. So And now it's kind of the same so this is What the distortion changes in our kick. Let's enable the filter again and listen without or with without It's still fuller. It sounds more punchy more aggressive Sometimes it's very subtle. Sometimes it's more pronounced in the overall mix. It's going to be pretty subtle. I think Okay, let's move on. Let's go to hi-hat. Let's select the range regions its place and Solo it. The hi-hat is super silent here or quiet rather. I am going to Make it louder for that matter. You can hear it better and Let's insert wolf shaper once again There it is By default as you can hear Wolf shaper doesn't do anything. The function is a straight line. It doesn't distort at all Now let's see what we can do. I can hear it's adding drive Let's see. Oh, that's very different Wait a minute. There's the filter also doing things. Yep So when we disable the filter it still kind of feels bottom-heavy now It's probably because the distortion is bringing up all the low frequencies that were present there, but where we settle We probably could use some Equalizer to see what's going on. Okay, let's see this CQ10Q. Let's play it again and Now without a distortion. Let's enable the analysis. Oh, maybe in the spectrogram Let's give it some gain so we can see it better This is without distortion Zaster distortion. You see we have lots of low frequency content that just wasn't brought up and The distortion brings it up Now we might not want it. So I'm going to hype as this Let's see how the two Actually affect the sound. It's much more pronounced Can say that and louder. So I'm going to turn it down The distortion makes it sound like the notes are longer. I'm not sure if we have some Hint of reverb there. It might be. All right, let's move on to the second hi-hat. It's a bit different This one is like more It's adding a backbeat to the thing Let's add wolf-shape or do that and see what we can do Now how about we do something a little bit more strange? Let's use a Thierce function Oh, looks like it didn't work and this basically creates Quantization errors It's basically like I bet like bit the production without a discerning Let's listen It's interesting what it's doing. I I want to add some EQ after that to To make that really shine, but yeah, let's let's keep it It's it's interesting. I hear the most stuff going like in the low mids I want to correct that so Scalp the tone a little bit I don't want so much lows low mids I don't like this More some high mids. Yeah Or even the highs Oh, I was low pass. Sorry. Is that too much highs? I'm not sure. I like this And the hi-hats got louder overall But I think that's not a bad thing. I think it works Next is the clap snare Let's loop its regions It actually sounds more like a snare than a clap, but Kind of exhibits both Characteristics, let's add wolf shapern. See what we can do with it I have too many favorite plugins. Sorry Let's see, you know, I'm placing the first point to kind of see where the Where the peak is so I don't have to use so much pre-gain or actually I don't have to use pre-gain at all However, I could I could even remove this Now instead of using post gain I can just bring this down However, if I have more points, I can't it's easy. So post gain is very useful So as you can hear Distortion makes the sound again sound longer because we are Shaving off we are cutting off the transient So it doesn't stand out Anymore and we kind of equalize it in loudness to the tail of the sound which makes the whole thing sound In some way bigger I kind of like this transient So I want to keep it a little bit of that Yeah, but again This makes the sound Fuller, I think it's quite Yeah, I like it. I like how the drums are sounding now. They are I don't know. I feel like they're more coming together Instead of like playing everyone in their own domain. We also have the drums bus But I don't think I'm going to touch it now. Maybe in the end. Let's now move on to the bass The bass plays throughout the whole thing like the kick And yeah, this is a very important part of the track Let's this and the kick is like the whole basis of the side transfer. The rest is just Like the support of that Now we have some clicks that come up from the sidechain compressor because it's stuck in too fast And it's kind of clipping the waveform You see if I reduce the attack It's it's reducing the volume so quickly that it actually distorts All right, let's add some wolf shaper and see what we can do As you can hear this bass is kind of developing There's also a filter there Let's see. We have it after the reverb. I'm not sure if that's gonna work. Well I think I like it before the reverb more. It's it's not as messy Generally adding reverb to bass sound is dangerous. So when I use that I always make sure that the reverb has filtering So I can filter out the low frequencies and this reverb does that it just filters out at one kilohertz. So everything below one kilohertz is almost gone More or less because well, I don't know how this how steep is this filter, but Yeah, like it's important to get rid of the bass in your reverb if you are adding reverb to a bass instrument Or it's gonna be sound really bad It's just gonna take out all the all the groove and the punch from the bass I think this is too much drive You see the cool thing about this is that I can mix different types of Distortion Let's add just a hint of this sound. Yeah, just a little bit of a crunch Isn't it too quiet now? I think I've made everything louder And the bass is just falling behind right now Maybe I should turn down the kick Even the lead is louder. What the heck? I think I've turned it way too much Yeah, I've turned it way too much without it. It's almost Oh, the hi is too loud I like the new clapster sound. It's really not better all right There it is now the lead the lead is a very interesting part Because it's very complex There's a lot of things going on. However, that's for another video We have lots of automation two of them are controlling the reverb two lanes And we have also a filter which is bandpass Here it is I can hear why It's doing what it's doing and finally we have a delay which We have we control the time and the bypass So when the notes are not playing we're enabling the delay changing the delay time It has like almost 100 feedback. So it basically loops that this forever which raises cool sound So let's see what we can do with distortion here and where we should use it I will try to use it maybe closer to the source like, you know, somewhere right after the compressor maybe Let's maybe loop Just a single Phrase of this and see what we can do Well, this is way ladder now, of course Let's turn it down Let's see what we can do by doing something a little less normal I'm gonna try to make this pregame work Okay, it's still a bit quiet. So I'm going to move the whole thing to the left I could use some band modes probably for that How about this? I think this peak is really really a peak I'm gonna push the compressor harder because I don't I can really get this distortion that I would expect Okay, so That's definitely something Maybe it's because of the band pass Let's disable the band pass Yeah, we're crushing it. How about putting it after the band pass? Oh, that's That's insane It's pretty fun, but Now we would need to cut down the amount of reverb. So it doesn't It doesn't, you know, blow up so much in the distortion. Maybe let's try it. I'm going to make the wet signal A wait, is this all wet? Oh, wait a second. We are automating this. It's not going to be so simple to turn down Yeah, I'm automating the wet and dry amount. So And there's no easy not an easy way to to actually change that there's not like a dry wet Not a hmm. Okay Let's see Is that interesting? Is that nice? Let's listen in the context of the song. I think my face expression is a little bit distorted Wave-shaped because of this headwear better now Okay, these are just ideas I'm not now like doing things that I would normally do to make this sound this track sound the best because I would use different plugins also and more plugins Now it's just a playground for experimenting with distortion specifically with wolf shapers. So Don't quote me on this saying. Hi Just trash this track man. It's a Ridiculous bad. Okay. Now it's time for explosions because explosions are cool. Who doesn't like explosions By the way, as a side note, I have made this entire track without any freaking distortion, man I did it all for you. I would normally never manage to make a full track without any distortion I did it just to show you Which can then add with distortion back. So please appreciate that effort on my side of Making my track not distorted at all. It's super clean. It's just It's the crystal sound Okay, let's maybe do it. No, let's do it in the end of the chain. Let's see Now explosions with all distortion is like Ice cream without ice cream. Now that's an explosion. That's how you blow things up Distort the shit out of it There's too little distortion in it. I think we need that more now You can feel the power in this, right? That's why distortion is there We need it. We need we need it to blow up That's the proper way you you do it. Yeah, of course, there's too much of it. So Yeah, I'm just joking now Not too much of distortion. There's too much of the explosion sound in the mix But the distortion is just the best Fantastic. Now it sounds way better. Okay Now what's happening after that? Well, this wasn't in this previous video in the uv 27 we just basically operate on this track the whole thing and then I just scrolled up and show you this So there's not much more to do here Uh, let's maybe Talk about this because you haven't heard this yet. This is my voice pitched to midi notes And then vocoded again with a synth using these notes too It's a pretty interesting thing But I don't think we can actually do anything useful with distortion in this it would make it sound messy and bad So excuse me as I proceed to the drum bus Now let's loop the whole thingy or maybe no, let's pick up a place where the the drums are really intense Ah, yeah now Let's add wolf shaper onto this drum bus Now where should we put it? Maybe after the compression? I like some light saturation Maybe maybe not more Interesting when I turn it down Well, that was ridiculous, but pretty awesome Let's see if we can keep that awesomeness Without the ridiculity of it it's It's a very thin line between making it ridiculous and terrible and making it awesome But I think it's always good to try And I think we did our best in the 25 minute time frame that I gave for this Actually, I didn't I just made it up So there it is I'll just let you and I'll enjoy the whole thing in the background As I talk to you Thanks for watching. I hope you've learned something Um, if you have any questions or suggestions for the future videos, please leave them in the comment section below I would also like to give big thanks to all the patreon supporters There are new patreon supporters after the last video the anfa vlog 27 that I published And there has been a record established a new record the previous record I believe for a single Single person's pledge was $5 per month now. It's $10 per month. So the bar is raised And now we've crossed another milestone But we are over $50 a month, which is very important for me because that's Kind of sort of pace for one wipe day of me So that's very important because I've I'm starting to cut off time from my full-time job as a graphic designer Actually kind of software developer lately. I'm more programming in bash Yeah bash kind of ridiculous, right? Then doing graphics recently, but never mind So I'm taking away the time from my full-time job And putting it into this Now for it's just two hours a month, but as your support grows This is gonna grow too. So if you like these videos if you want to see more of them and Want to see better videos from me, please consider becoming a patreon subscriber You can also get some cool bonuses like free access to my album and access to a private discord server Where I talk about stuff that I don't talk with publicly because they're too crappy Anyway, this track is available for download. You can get this version and Just play around with it So yeah, enjoy and I'll see you in the next video. Bye