 This video is sponsored by DistroKid. Follow the VIP link in the description down below to get 7% off an already amazing price to distribute your music to the world. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. I've been wanting to make this video for ages to make sure that everybody is aware of analog obsession. Now analog obsession makes plugins really high quality plugins which you can get absolutely free. Now you can choose to support them if you wish via their Patreon and I encourage you to do so but if you can't or don't want to do that they are completely free and they don't even ask for an email address or anything like that. They've just got the download link and you can start using them. That's pretty generous in this day and age. Now as the name suggests I say they I think it's just a single individual if I'm honest with you but as the name suggests analog obsession these plugins are largely based on classic analog hardware. Now I think this type of plugin can be fairly intimidating to new producers in the modern era who are used to seeing sort of graphic representations of everything etc. So in this video I'm going to highlight just three of their many free plugins but I'm going to do a kind of a mini tutorial for each of them. So this is not just free plugin news it's a little bit educational as well. So let's dive in with possibly the most renowned of them all. If we look at these two paid plugins which emulate the famous LA2A compressor we can see that they stick to the traditional layout of having this large gain knob on the left hand side and the peak reduction knob on the right hand side. Not so with analog obsessions LA LA compressor or I guess you could call it their La La compressor. They've opted here to place the gain knob on the right hand side just above the peak reduction knob and that's because they needed to make room for some extra functionality and they've placed the knobs to control the extra functionality on the left hand side over here. More on that later but firstly if you're not familiar with the LA2A compressor it's one of the most famous and well used compressors of all time. Now despite this it's actually quite easy to use and therefore rather appealing to some of you beginners out there and that's mainly because there's just one knob which we'll talk about in a moment which you're going to use most of the time to affect the compression. Now as I mentioned there are two major knobs here the top one here is that gain knob we talked about but it's important to understand that this is an output gain knob or sometimes it's called a makeup gain knob so it's just affecting the signal right at the end of the processing in this compressor so it doesn't actually affect the compression at all just makes it louder or quieter after the fact so that leaves this peak reduction control which is where we really control compression here. You can think of this as something like a threshold control that you'll see on other compressors and it simply sets the point at which compression will occur so once the signal goes over this level then we'll start to see and hear some compression happening. Now there is no attack released or ratio controls with this compressor and that may lead you to believe that it's not very useful but it turns out it is very very useful I especially like it on vocals acoustic guitar and almost always use it on bass guitar as well. Now what I'm going to do is just play some vocals and I've got this compressor applied and you'll see with the VU meter we're just getting around about two decibels of compression happening have a listen. Now although we're getting those two decibels of compression you can't hear okay it's not obvious to your ears which means it leaves the vocals sounding nice and natural. Now although I'm not pushing it very hard you'll see that if I push this peak reduction knob up and I'll just adjust the gain a little bit as well and we'll get a lot more compression this time or gain reduction I should say and you'll still hear that the vocal tends to sound rather natural. And that for me is really the sort of selling point of this compressor and it's why you would use it. So if you're new to compression definitely get hold of this apply it to something that you just want to subtly change the dynamic range of and then just play with this peak reduction knob. Now you can actually affect things like the attack release and ratios by switching this switch over here but it's just two fixed settings okay. So they call this the limiter mode it's not particularly aggressive but it just has a higher ratio and I believe attack time don't quote me on that but I think it does. So that that is something to be aware of but mostly I would use this for compression. So what about this extra functionality well you'll see these knobs on the left hand side and these four knobs relate to frequency so we have a high pass filter here we have two knobs which relate to mid frequencies and then we have this knob on the right hand side which affects the high frequencies. What's important to note here is they don't actually change the sound of our signal at all. Look I'll just change this high pass filter here I'll just change that and you'll hear there's no change to the vocal. Well not in terms of frequency but you may notice that the needle didn't move much this time yeah we're getting about two decibels before now hardly anything have a look again. And that is because this is filtering out low frequencies for the compressor or the signal going to the compressor okay so not what we hear but what the compressor hears and that's how it decides whether to compress or not so by sending less low frequencies we're getting less compression because of course low frequencies can really affect compressors a lot more. So we've got similar control over mid and high frequencies as I mentioned earlier. Now we've also got one more knob which is just that we can switch this to an external sidechain meaning we can use a signal from another part of our mix to trigger the compressor on this particular signal. So this is often used for example for kick drums to affect the level of a bass guitar or something like that so we've got that functionality and that's common on these types of compressors. So overall not only is this a free plugin which is useful to have around but I actually reckon it's one of the better LA2A emulators out there. Now quickly before we finish off I almost forgot to mention this for people who are beginners the other thing that this type of compressor does as well as compressor signal is actually add a little bit of color and character to the signal. So this will actually add some harmonic distortion to the signal which can just be rather nice to listen to. Let's put it that way I won't go too much more into that but that's another reason why you may opt for this compressor over the stock compressor that you have with your DAW. As with the LA2A when other companies are emulating the famous 1176 compressor they tend to stick to the same kind of layout that the original hardware used and we can see that here with these two versions. However again with analog obsession they've gone for a different layout and that's probably because they also have added some additional functionality again but essentially it operates in a very very similar way. For example with this compressor we do have attack release and ratio controls. These are not as I say present on the LA2A so this makes this a much more versatile compressor but it's especially useful when you actually want to have some really fast attacks and fast releases and it's well known for that. We'll be looking at an example of that in a moment but I want to quickly point out that with this particular version from analog obsession you can see that the attack and release controls go from fast to slow. So the attack gets slower as we turn the knob clockwise. That's kind of opposite to the original hardware and some of the other plugins so if we were to look at this emulation from universal audio in this case as we turn the attack knob more to the right or clockwise the attack gets faster. It's worth knowing that in case you've been using some other plugins. Also there's a bit of a difference in the way we control ratio. We have a 4 to 1 through to 20 to 1 ratio control on this plugin which is the same range that we have on the original hardware. However on the original hardware there was just four options 4 to 1, 8 to 1, 12 to 1 or 20 to 1 but you can see on this analog obsession one we've got some choices in between which is probably why they've decided to put it on a rotary knob rather than having those buttons. That does affect one other part of the functionality. On the original you could press all of those four buttons in it once and get a kind of a very different very aggressive ratio and some very aggressive compression because we don't have those four buttons we can't do that on this version this fetish version from analog obsession. So I think that's why they've put this slam button up here okay they just say in the documentation it's for very aggressive compression I think that's what is emulating there okay. Now just like the original compressor we have an input and an output knob the output is an as it says it's a makeup gain knob but the input does control the input going into the compressor so it does affect the amount of compression in effect okay so do be aware of that and just like we saw in the LA2A or the LALA compressor from analog obsession earlier we have these filters for the compression sidechain if you like the signal which is being heard by the compressor they don't affect or filter out or sort of eq the actual signal just the signal going to the compressor and also just like the LALA compressor we saw earlier we can also use an external sidechain another source to affect the compression. So where would I use this in a place where I want usually much faster and more aggressive compression it has a different character to the LA2A the LA2A is a tube-based compressor this this is not this is a fat-based compressor so it you know doesn't have the same character although it does color the signal a little bit. I've applied it to my vocal the same vocal to control the transience with the with the vocals these will be usually the beginning of words where the signal is much much louder momentarily okay and I want to control that often I'll use this in conjunction with an LA2A compressor before I go into it just to control those transience as we call them let's just have a listen and look at it applied to that same vocal. And you can see the needle's moving much much quicker than it was earlier and as I say it's been triggered by the beginning of those words and it's released very very quickly because we don't want it to stay on and actually compress the quieter parts of those words or phrases. So a very very well made free plugin indeed and very very useful. Speaking of free this video is free to you largely because of our sponsor DistroKid. If you want to release your music to the world don't forget to follow that VIP link in the description down below and you can release your music to places like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Google Play etc via DistroKid really easily just upload the song some artwork DistroKid does the rest for you as I say follow that VIP link in the description down below. This is rare from analog obsession and this is based upon famous pool tech EQ or EQs there's a number of them. Now these are very very popular EQs and they're used in various different places in a mix but I reckon they're possibly one of the most confusing EQs to understand if you're a beginner or let's say it would be hard to figure out exactly what it's doing just by kind of looking at its knobs so let's demystify this for you now. If you're not familiar with pool tech EQs I first want you to note two pairs of buttons if you like we've got a boost button here with an attenuation button and then also we've got a boost with an attenuation button if you don't know what attenuation means you can think of it as decrease so you can think of this boost is increase attenuate is decrease okay so think of this as two different pairs the ones on the left are relating to low frequencies and the ones on the right are relating to high frequencies this is the best way to get yourself sort of anchored with the interface of a pool tech EQ if you like. Now in order to really understand what the other knobs do in relation to these two knobs I think we're going to have to use something called plugin doctor so I'll switch over we've got plugin doctor which is an analysis plugin and before we get into those knobs by the way I'm just going to look at the harmonic analysis so at the moment this plugin is switched off but if we switch it on you'll see that the plugin does actually add a whole bunch of harmonics that lets you know that even before you even change any of the controls on here and actually use the EQ at all it's going to change the sound it's probably going to be subtle but a lot of people do like that about these pool tech EQs okay so that's the first thing to note let's go over to the linear analysis so that we can see what this is really going to be doing what these knobs are going to be doing to the frequencies in our sound let's start off with one of those boosts knobs that we saw on the left hand side I'm just going to push it up and as you can see there's lots of low end frequencies there which are being boosted now which frequencies it's affecting is controlled with this knob down here the low frequency selector here it's set to 20 at the moment 20 hertz go to 30 hertz we go to 60 and 100 like so okay so that's how we select which low end frequencies we are affecting okay so let's turn that all the way down so likewise we have an attenuation knob which turns frequencies down so as I control that you'll see those frequencies get pushed down and again it's being affected by this selector down here at the bottom 20 30 60 and 100 hertz now you would think wouldn't you are why you have two controls why have a boost and an attenuation why not one knob because surely the attenuation is going to cancel out the boost well that kind that's kind of true but it's not precisely true they're not affecting precisely the same frequencies and this is one of the unique things about this EQ so we can create a boost like so and then we can attenuate it right like so but you'll notice that just after the boost there's a bit of a dip and that's because we're attenuating a slightly different set of frequencies we're centered around 20 if you like but we're not exactly sort of on it okay now that characteristic is going to happen even as we move the frequency knob there okay so that's one of the first things to understand about a pool tech EQ and how it affects the frequency ranges let's turn those down I promise you we'll have some examples by actually listening to some music in a moment but first of all I think it's worth explaining the other two pairs so again for the high frequencies we have a boost knob and as I push that up you can see it's affecting the high frequencies there and we can select the frequencies again by using this high frequency selector now that selector is affecting this boost only not the attenuation keep that in mind because the attenuation has got its own frequency selector all the way here on the right okay so this works in a slightly different way for the high end and I should quickly mention as well that for the boost we also have this bandwidth control this is kind of like a cue control changes the range of frequencies it's affecting okay that's only affecting the boost not the attenuation are you with me so far okay so we can have a similar set of results in that we can boost an area and then we can attenuate and those that boost and that attenuation are kind of interacting with each other yeah except we could even do something like have the boost affecting uh say 10k and the attenuation affecting 5k yeah and you can see there that we are creating a little dip just before our boost okay or we could set the boost to down here yeah to say let's say three kilohertz and then we'll set the attenuation to 10 and that dip is now occurring after the boost yeah so there's different ways you can use it in the high end so what does that all amount to what's the point of all of that well it just has a very unique way of affecting your music mostly I'm going to say that you can kind of boost areas or frequency ranges but then control that boost that's a very very big overview of what you can do I guess but it's the way I tend to use it or tend to think about it so let's set everything back to zero and listen to this on on my mix bus now I should explain because I know you'll be thinking what do I use this EQ on well it's frequently used on bass guitar it really makes it fatter but you can sort of control it it doesn't get out of controls easily with this you could use this on vocals it's nice to create presence with vocals or you can use it on a mix bus as I'm about to on the master bus so let's have a little bit of a listen to the chorus of this song I'm just going to boost the low end and you'll hear that being boosted and then I'm going to attend you out and you'll hear it being controlled listen carefully make sure you use good monitors so for me in those situations I'd probably just use this on a bass guitar but what I'm doing there is just controlling and putting a bit of a dip just after that low end boost to just contain it a bit so it's not out of control you know I really rather like that but as I said probably prefer to do that directly with the bass guitar then again the same thing with an attenuation so let's add a bit of sort of air to the sound here I'm going to select eight eight kilohertz for the high frequencies and I'm going to boost that and I'm actually going to let's do this let's select five kilohertz for the attenuation so I'll do a dip just after that airiness to sort of accentuate it in a way so that is rare from analog obsession if you're not sure whether you want to be using pool tech EQs or not if you're not sure if you see the benefit why not download this and have a play with it on some of your music and you may just get some magic happening here's an idea for you if you'd like me to make other tutorials of other analog obsession plugins just let me know which ones in the comments down below I'd love to do that for you if you'd simply like to know about other free plugins you may want to watch this playlist right here or is it up there probably up there could be up there nice definitely there