 Firstly, the last thing I would ever want is for you to feel bad about falling into this particular habit. I myself was guilty of it for a very long time until I finally figured out that it was not only not helping me, but it was actually hindering my progress in mixing. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. Today we're going to be discussing why you should stop using presets with your plugins. Not only are they not that helpful with mixing, but they also have the potential to slow down your learning. Now with every rule there are exceptions, so we'll be discussing those a little bit later on. But first of all, let's talk about a type of plugin where I think presets are really unhelpful, and that's EQ. So in this project, I've got two vocal recordings. You can see them here in green and in blue. Now they're both exactly the same vocal performance by the same singer recorded at exactly the same time, but in two slightly different ways, which I'll explain later. But first of all, I want to sculpt the sound of these recordings, and I'm going to sculpt the sound using an EQ plugin. So I'm going to go to the first recording here, the green one, I'll go to my insert effects, I'll click on plus, go to insert audio effects, and I'm going to choose my favorite EQ that's pro q3 by a fab filter. Now this is a female vocal and it is or I'm wanting it to be kind of poppy. So I'm going to go across to my presets here and select the female pop vocal. Okay, there it is. It's done. It's trick of course should sound great. Let's wait and see. Okay, so I want to apply the same effect of course, through the other vocal recording. So I'll just close that. And here in Katewalk, I can just hold control on the keyboard, drag that first one across to the second one there. And not only has it got the same plugin inserted there, but it's also got exactly the same settings applied. Okay, let's have a listen to each of them in turn and see if we can hear a difference. So I'll solo the first one. Here we go. Okay, sounds not too bad. Let's go to the second one. Not only is it different, but it's kind of really harsh, isn't it? There's a really big difference that I really wouldn't want that as a result to be honest with you. So if I've applied exactly the same preset, why am I getting two completely different results and sort of fairly unpredictable results if I'm honest with you? Well, the reason is the nature of EQ doesn't really lend itself to using presets in this way. Let me explain. I'll go into Pro Q3 here. Let's have a look at one of the settings in here. I'm just going to look at this second setting here. So what this setting is saying is at 60 Hertz, let's reduce the signal by three decibels. In other words, for the part of the sound, which is at 60 Hertz, let's just turn it down by three decibels. Importantly, it's not saying at 60 Hertz, let's set the value to minus three decibels. It isn't an absolute setting like that. It's a relative setting, whatever the signal is. So if it's currently at, say, 10 decibels, it's going to reduce it by three and make it seven decibels. That's a simple explanation. So you can see that the result entirely depends on the input on the sound we're getting. You're going to get a different result depending on the actual recording. Now, these recordings were recorded exactly the same time by the same singer, same performance, as I said. So what is actually different about them? Well, firstly, they're recorded on two separate microphones. I actually got the two microphones and I put the capsules really, really close together and had the singer sing into both of them at the same time. So different microphones can have a different sound to them. Now, we happen to be using the same singer, of course, at this time, but obviously I hope you would understand that different singers also sound different. The distance of the singer from the microphone, if we get further away, yeah, things sound more teeny. If we get close, things sound deeper. That's a proximity effect. So that really affects the low end a lot. So all of these things can change the input signal. In addition, with this second one here, I recorded this with the Rode NT1A microphone. I also had it going through a preamp and a compressor on the way in, okay. So that was changing the sound before I even got to my interface with the recording. Different sound, different results with the same preset. And that is why presets with EQ are very, very rarely useful to you. Now, EQ, of course, is not only used to create a tone. Let me step back a bit. If you're just starting out, you probably do think that EQ is like a tone control. Yeah, just like a tone control on your guitar or on your stereo system where it would have bass, mid, treble, something like that. Now, in some sense, yes, it is like that. It changes things in a similar way to those controls that you see on a guitar or on an amplifier or on a stereo system. But in mixing, EQ also has another purpose. You see, some instruments or sounds share the same frequencies, a lot of common frequencies. You can get this effect of one thing masking out another, let's say you've got a piano part, which shares a lot of the same frequencies as the vocal part. That will have the effect of not really both of them being present, but one will tend to cancel the other one out. So EQ is often used in mixing to carve out spaces so that one thing can shine, okay. That's a simplistic explanation, but it means that the EQ for this purpose is also dependent upon what else is going on in the song. And of course, the preset cannot know what else is going on in the song. So even in this case, where we're using a preset for something as common as a vocal, the final sound of the vocal in the mix will be very, very dependent upon the other things which are present in the mix. So as I say, EQ is commonly used in mixing. Another plugin which is very commonly used is compression. So in this project, I have a kick drum and I want it to sound really nice and tight. So I've got a compressor, which I've got inserted here on the kick drum channel. And I am going to select as a preset kick tight, okay. It's put in the settings there. Now what we're going to do is have a listen to this with the plugin applied and without the plugin applied. I'm going to minimize the display here so that you can't sort of be visually distracted. I want you to use your ears here, okay. So we're going to start off with the kick drum switch off and then periodically I will switch it on and tell you when I've done that. Let's go. So we'll start off with it off and on off and on. Now if you could hear the difference between those two, I'm afraid that your mind has been playing tricks on you because there was no difference in the actual sound because the settings from this compressor are not set correctly to actually make a change. Let's bring it up again. The main setting for a compressor or one of the main settings for a compressor is the threshold, okay. This is the stage at which we start compressing the signal. Now at the moment you can see it's set to minus 13 dB or so. Let's just see where the signal is reaching with this kick drum. You can see it's only getting up to about minus 20 dB. So it's not even going over the threshold and even starting to compress. This really crude example is showing you that a compressor is highly dependent upon the input that it receives. It can't even start compressing if it doesn't have enough input for example. Beyond that, things like the ratio and the attack and the release are also affected by this signal that it's receiving. Now the main reason why you're probably using a preset with your compressor is because you don't really understand how to use compression and that's fine. We were all at that point once. I'm going to show you a video towards the end of this video. I'm going to put a link for another video that I made about compression, the basics of it and many people have told me that once they watch that video they finally understood what the controls on a compressor were actually doing. I'm going to leave that to the end of the video because I don't want you to go there quite yet because I've got some important information for you here. Now one of the things I would suggest before you go and learn how to use a compressor is to start to think about the differences in different sounds from different instruments. Let's close this down here and I'm going to go to another part of this project. I'll just get rid of the console. You can see that I've got two wave files here. I'll just zoom in so that we can see them a bit more clearly and we have a snare drum here and a bass guitar. Now what I want you to do is just look at these two waveforms and think about how different they are. The snare drum for example has a really quick attack there yeah and it quickly decays. That sort of spike that you can see at the beginning there is generally referred to as a transient okay. That's the initial impact of the sound often with drums, not with all drums but a lot of drum sounds. It's very quick and then it decays very very quickly. The second waveform we're seeing here is a bass guitar. Now I've also got a reasonably quick attack on this or transient but you can see that it decays much much more slowly over time until the bass player takes their finger off of the note. So there's some important things to remember here. If you wanted to change the initial impact of something with a compressor then you will be looking at that attack or that transient and you would use the attack primarily in combination with the threshold and the ratio. The ratio is going to control how much you compress the signal, how much you turn it down by. So compression is about understanding controls, understanding the nature of the sound that you're processing and making a plan. Probably the most important thing is making a plan. What do I want to do with this? How do I want to change, for example, this bass guitar? Do I want to have it have a quick impact and then die away or do I want it to be sustained? Do I want to keep that note alive for a long time? Those are the things we want to be asking ourselves with compression. So I'm afraid to tell you there's no real shortcuts with things like compression. However, you can understand it's not beyond you. You just need to have it explained to you in the right way. So EQ and compression make up a massive amount of what you do when you're creating a great mix. However, they depend highly upon the input they receive to get a great result. Manufacturers can't know what that input is when they're creating a preset and therefore the results going to be unpredictable and the whole time that you're using them you're not learning how to create those sounds yourself. So I would strongly recommend that you put a little bit of time into learning about EQ and compression rather than using presets. Now there are times where presets can be useful and it's usually with plugins that don't depend so heavily upon their input. Let's discuss some of those scenarios now. So one of the reasons I think you may make good use of presets is for something that I'll call stylized effects. These are sounds that have a particular style to them. So for example, let's think about vocals say in the 1950s, they had that huge echo on them. Now they weren't intended to sound like that person was in this massive space or heavy. It was just a sort of a style to that I guess people liked. Now if you just wanted to recreate that with some 1950s echo or reverb preset, I think that would be absolutely fine. Especially because it's not really that dependent upon the input that it's receiving. Yeah, it's going to do the same thing to any particular voice that it's receiving to get that style. Another occasion where this is really strongly true would be presets for guitar amp sims. For example, you think to yourself, hey, I just want to get that basic sound that Brian May gets. Yeah, there's probably a preset for that. And it's going to get you there really quickly choosing an appropriate sort of amp and cabinet and what have you. However, I would still caution with this that it's probably not going to be exactly the same because it's still depending upon the basic tone of your guitar, the settings that you have on your guitar, maybe even your fingers and your style of picking, etc. But in my experience, it can get you a long way there as a kind of a starting point. So one great use of the preset functionality for your plugins is using custom presets. These are presets you create yourself where you know you want a similar outcome each time and the inputs going to be similar each time. For example, with my own voice on my videos, because I'm always recording my voice in the same room with the microphone at a similar distance each time, I do have some presets for different situations where I record my voice. That can happen with a vocal on an album, for example, as well. If you've got roughly the same kind of a setup from song to song on an album, and you want to make sure you maintain a consistency in sound, then you may go for some presets so that you can quickly set up the sound of your vocal for each track. So yeah, it's kind of useful to use that functionality of your plugins. So I can certainly see a scenario where presets could be used as a learning tool also. Let's go back to our example of using compression. I still feel that it's best not to use presets, but if you're really not sure about what kind of attack and release settings to use for specific instruments, then it may help you to learn up a preset relating to that instrument and try and sort of reverse engineer what you're seeing. As I say, you're still going to have to adjust things like the threshold, but you could use that for a little bit of learning. So I know you just want to move on and create that fantastic mix, and there's a lot to learn about mixing. So presets seems like a viable option, but you're only doing yourself a disservice, especially in terms of actually learning about this craft yourself. Now, some things are particularly difficult to get your head around, and it seems like for most people, compression is one of those. That's why I made this video about compression, explaining what the common controls do so there's no longer a mystery to you. I reckon you should watch that right now.