 This is the new fast limiter plugin from Focusrite and before we find out why it deserves its name so much, let's just have a quick listen to this track I've been working on and I'm bringing up this meter plugin here so that we can easily see some of the problems which are occurring. And we can see right away that this track is actually clipping already and it's not all that loud so we can't simply go ahead and just turn the volume up because it would be clipping even more and that's why we need a limiter. So let's see how we can solve this issue with fast limiter from Focusrite. What we need to do first of all is go and select a profile so I'm going over to the left hand side here and I'm just going to roughly pick a close profile pop will be absolutely fine I'll just pick that and then what I'm going to do is just click on this learn button and actually play the track and allow fast limiter to analyze the track. So it's done that already and you probably just heard there that the track did get a little bit louder sounding okay but there's a few controls I want to take a look at first before doing a B comparison with the original. We have some sort of modifiers down the bottom here so that we can now adapt this to our own needs. First of all we can do a little bit more emphasis on the bass if we wish I'm not going to change that for this particular song but you can do that if you wish. Then we can change the resonance feature here this is where they've picked up some particular resonant frequencies and they've adjusted them and then you can blend the changes that they've come up with with their AI engine there okay so I'll leave that roughly where it is that's fine. The next thing we can do is increase saturation now this is a nice little trick to sort of make it seem as though the track has got louder when it hasn't necessarily got all that louder. I'm actually going to increase this saturation up here I reckon around about here it should be just fine and then we can adjust the transient slider here to make things either sort of punchier or not. Now I'm going to do some A B testing now so I'm going to start off by bypassing the settings I've got on the moment and then I'm going to switch them on see if you can hear the difference. But here's the thing that obviously does sound louder but are we clipping still? Let's bring up that metering plug in again and let's have a listen with this now switched on. So you can see not only does the track sound louder but we're no longer clipping we're nicely below the threshold for that. Now you can go ahead of course and fine tune this to your own needs it's nice if you go over to the detail tab over here for example you get some different metering going on here you can meet it in loss and you can do all different kinds of different metering there and by the way you can check this to make sure things are okay we just go back to the fast tab there we can click on this button here and just make sure that everything is okay for our track let's have a listen. So you can see it's done some analysis there saying the loudness is okay the loudness range is okay and the peak values are okay as well we can further adjust the sound or adapt the sound by changing these settings here modern neutral and aggressive and you may just want to experiment with those so you can get the sound that you want for your track. Hi folks I'm Mike and I hope you're well. Fast Limiter is just the latest in a series of plugins from Focus right that focus on fast results using a combination of artificial intelligence and a bit of a different UI design as well I've been checking out the other plugins in this series which are actually all a part of a bundle starting off with an equalizer which is very unusual and very very useful in my opinion fast equalizer is really not like any equalizer I've seen before and the Y-Hex design does probably indeed mean it will be fast to use I've got this one applied to an acoustic guitar track I'm going to go ahead and select acoustic guitar for a profile here on the left hand side and then I'm going to click this learn button and play the track. Now it's come up with an EQ curve for this acoustic guitar and I'm liking what it's done already to be honest with you but take a look at this look at these bands that you can adjust here they relate to the guitar body here for the body of the guitar the picking band for the picking of the guitar and this air band here for those high and kind of airy areas of the guitar so I could go ahead now and actually adjust those to my liking really easily so I'm going to play the track and do that so this enables you to hone in really quickly on particular areas of an instrument of course you can do it with more than guitar let's bring up an instance here of this plugin on a female vocal I'm going to do the same again go over to the left hand side I'm going to go to vocal high because it's a female vocal going to click on learn again and play the track and as you can see there's some different bands which have appeared here we've got the body band again but we've also got this one here nasal we've got presence and we've got sibilants we can adjust all of those let's go ahead and do that so as you can see again this enables you to sort of hone in on the areas of this particular type of instrument or or vocal and adjust those really easily and quickly can you get detailed and use this like a regular EQ of course you can just click on the detail tab over here and you can make adjustments like you normally would with any EQ with these notes here you can adjust you know things like the q etc as you do that so yeah a regular EQ but also some really fascinating features there which are tailor-made for specific types of performances what I love about this fast range of plugins is the consistency of design I've got the compressor applied here to a drum track and if you've already watched the rest of this video up until now then you probably already understand how I'm going to use this plugin I'm going to go over to the left and I'm going to select a profile in this case because I've got it applied to drums I'm going to select drums then I'm going to click learn and play the track and you can see already that it's applied some compression we can see that in the display here now I want to point out a couple of things here first of all you've got these selections here to automatically adjust the setting soft neutral and hard let's have a listen on soft neutral hard okay that hard compression is way too much for this track I'm going to go for neutral for now another thing I want to point out is this automatic gain compensation which is happening here or output compensation you can see that after this neutral compression the plugin is able to add another 2.5 decibels and we get to be with the same peak levels we had before but of course there's some compression happening there so things could sound a bit louder or punchier without actually going above the peak that they were at before let's have a quick sort of bypass and then I'll switch the plug on plug in back on we can hear the difference so that's on neutral there's just a nice amount of compression there and giving us just a little bit more punch than we had before now of course you can go into detail and change this and tailor this to your needs just go to the detailed view over here a whole bunch of other controls appear here and what's really nice about this is the way that the actual display changes as we change things so we've got our ratio here we've got threshold I'm just going to adjust those and play the track and look at what happens with the display can really easily see what the controls are doing and the same for things like attack release and that kind of thing at the bottom here let's adjust those we kind of see that happening in real time as we adjust those features a very handy and very fast compressor so let's add some reverb to those vocals using fast verb now I have this inserted on a bus which is what I would normally do with things like vocals when I'm adding reverb and because of that I'm just going to make sure that I have the mix control turned all the way up full so that only the reverb sound is on the bus then I can blend them together in my console in my door as you may have guessed I'm going to start off by selecting a profile which is going to be vocals I'm going to click learn and then play the track you should have helped me from the start and never let us drift apart and it's come up with our basic settings there we can make some really easy quick controls here with things like time here you should have helped me from the start and never let us drift apart so obviously we can choose a much bigger tail on the reverb there we've got position which for me really helps you to make it a little bit more the subject more focused or not have a listen to this you should have helped me from the start I like it about there that's fine we've got width so we can get some stereo width happening there and we've got pre-delay as well have a listen to that i'll just pop that up a little bit you should have helped me from the start and never let us drift apart okay we've also got this detailed view here with a few controls here things like colors we can make it sound darker or lighter sounding things like clarity modulation is in there as well and probably one of the most useful controls that you can have is a high pass filter I like to get rid of all the low end of my reverbs on vocals a lot of the time so i'll just be pushing this up a little bit here gives a little bit less mud in the low end let's have a listen to that vocal now in the context of everything else in the track you should have helped me from the start I never thought I'd need to and never let us drift apart I'm now that's fast verb very easy to use to get quick results sometimes we have two tracks which occupy very similar frequencies and they can get in the way or mask each other a very typical example of this is the kick drum and the bass guitar both down there in the low end and often playing at the same time now sometimes this can have the effect of the bass guitar just overriding the kick and the kick appears to lose some punch okay so we want to reveal it that's what we're going to do with this plugin our first decision here is which track is in the foreground which is in the background because we want the kick to be revealed that's the foreground track and then the bass is the background track okay so that's where we insert this plugin actually on the background track in this case i say the bass okay the next thing we need to do is select a profile so i'm just going to go down here to universal and i'm going to select kick this is the foreground instrument that we we're actually choosing here okay as our profile now i have the kick signal with this particular track being sent to this plugin that's called a sidechain if you're not familiar so i've just done a send from the kick and then that that appeared in the list here this plugin and i just sent it to this okay so it's hearing the kick drum the next thing i need to do is click on learn and play those two tracks together let's have a look at the metering over here for a moment so with this meter hear the green one that's the sidechain we'll play it in a moment and that is where the kick drum is playing then over on this side we've got the actual sort of internal sound from this plugin the bass guitar and then we've got ducking happening okay this is showing you when and where we are reducing the volume so let's look at all those things there's the kick playing there and there's the ducking and there's the bass what is ducking ducking is that point where we duck or reduce the volume of something so that we can hear something else now it may not be ever so evident to you at the moment how that's happening but you can we can make that much more obvious by pushing up this dial here ducking it's already on heavy you should probably be able to hear what's happening to the bass guitar now that i've got that on full and if you couldn't hear that let's just take the kick out of the equation and now you'll really hear what's happening to that bass guitar okay so you can hear it just moving out of the way of the kick when that is playing now you can do this often with a regular compressor if it's got sidechain capabilities but this isn't really just a regular compressor it is compressing but it's doing it across a frequency range so it's a multi-band compressor and it's figuring out for you with its ai the most important frequencies so it's not simply just reducing the volume it's doing it on a frequency by frequency basis we can adjust all of that in the detailed view so that we can you know fine tune this to what we want first of all we've got a range of frequencies here which we can affect or not affect let's have a look at that if we just want to focus on those real low frequencies we can adjust the speeds kind of like the attack there for how quickly the ducking effect works there and then also the precision there how much precision we're going to use in terms of the frequencies here that's just a couple of bands there and then we can go up to i guess it's 32 bands there so this is a really nice easy way of dealing with masking in your mix it's one of the most important tasks you can go through to really clean up your mix and to help certain instruments shine at particular times if you want to learn more about sidechain compression check out the video on the other side of this logo it's a technique which is incredibly useful it's not that difficult to do and you really should know about it go ahead watch it now