DAN AGOSTO: Hi. I'm Dan Agosto with Gearwire.Com, and today we're going to take a look at the Blue Cat Frequency Analyst. It's a new plugin from Blue Cat, I believe, that just came out this week.

So, to do this, we're going to sort of do a little mastering EQ on a track that I did a while back for Gearwire [SOUNDS LIKE] Pumper, and let's just give it a listen.

[DAN PLAYS A TRACK FOR MASTERING EQ]

It's already pretty well compressed so we're not going to do anything but some EQ. All right, so let's take a look at this plug. Pretty big GUI and right now this is the spectrum view. There's a few different views on here. On of the cool things about this visually is that there's a thing called window opacity. Right now, it's at 100%, and you can turn that down, and that actually makes it see through. You can actually see what's going behind the plugin. It's kind of a neat feature, but the one thing about it is once you do that, it's kind of hard to find the slider again to turn it back up, so I'm pretty much when I use this I'm just going to leave it up all the way.

So, I'm going to play back the track and we'll see what happens as far as what this plugin shows us.

[DAN PLAYS A TRACK FOR MASTERING EQ]

All right, so standard spectrum view, the X axis is measured in Hz or the frequencies, and Y axis, up and down, that's our decibels. So, as you can pretty much see, this is already a pretty loud track, so what we might want to do is to make it easier to sort of see the curves is to bring to bring down the actual response curve a little bit, and we can do that in our adjust mode over here. So basically, if I wanted to, I can turn it up if it's too quiet, but you can see that brings the curve almost off the charts, but we can bring it down to so it's more in the center, there we go, and I'm going to reset the peak. So, as you can see, it's holding the peaks forus in this view, and of course, if we want to reset, we just hit this button over here where we can reset the average as well. I don't think we're showing that right now. We can also freeze everything and just sort of take a snapshot of what we're looking at.

Some of the other things we can do here, we've already taken a look at the adjust mode so let's take a look at that again. There is a filter on here, and it's basically a high shelving filter I believe or it could a ganged low pass or high pass filter. I'm not exactly sure but if we want to sort of even it out a lot, because a lot of times with program material, we're seeing something that with a curve that starts out high and gets lower. So, if you want to make it flatter just for the sake of making it look like that, we can turn up the slope a little bit. As you can see, it's more -- it has the frequencies more of an even EQ. We can also go crazy and just knock that off the charts right there, and we can also go down so that we're just monitoring the -- visually monitoring the low frequencies. I'm going got set that to zero because I don't really have a use for that right now.

We also have an envelope control. One of the things on here is peak reset and that'll just basically, after a certain amount of seconds, reset the peak. Right now, it has 21 dB/second which means every second the peaks are going to go down to 21 dB. We can turn that down and go hold a little longer, as you can see, especially up here.

Also, we're able to change the envelope of our response curve, and what that helps us with, right now it's very quick, and basically what we're getting is the response of a peak meter. And now, to really understand this you need to understand the difference between a peak meter and a VU meter which are two main types of meters. Peak meters are what you're going to see in the digital domain. They're very fast, they'll go up all the way right away with the sound, but the problem with that is our ears don't really hear that way; we hear of more of an average amount of time. So, VU meters, which you see on a lot analog consoles that actually has the needle that will like pop up, or a lot of home stereo, older home stereo units. So what we can do is actually independently change the attack and release time to make it more like a VU meter, so if we turn up the attack what we're going to see is actually it's going to definitely stop jumping as much. I'm going to turn up the attack and it'll sort of slow down, so it's giving us more of an average of what we're hearing. You can do the same with the release, and it will actually get started on moving real slow, very sluggish, which can actually be very helpful when trying to find like just general areas. You can see that we have a lot of energy right here sort of peaking around at 100 Hz and we can see that better than if we have everything turned down. You can still see that using the whole peak but if we return that we wouldn't be able to really see that much at all. I'm going to leave it down all the way or actually maybe just turn the attack up a little bit, the release up a little bit, about there, probably sort of in the middle.

There is also a transform mode here, and what that basically does if we -- there's a speed control, we can turn that up and you can see it changes quicker basically, and we turn down the attack more and the release more, and we'll see that a lot better, and this is very confusing so you may not want it to go that fast. So we can turn it down at bit, and it sort of helps a little bit but of course the envelope we want to have up a little bit so it sort of see more of how our ears would hear what's going on. I'm turning the speed up back to 100%, and we got to -- Sometimes, you can't get the knobs to go right, and you can just double click these, type in the numerical value, 100, or go straight to zero -- or straight to 100.

Precision, that's a very important one actually. If you're looking into zero in on certain frequencies, see if there's any problem, you want to turn that precision up, and what that'll do is you see a lot more peaks as you can see, so this is actually taking up a lot more CPU power, and you can also turn it all the way down, and now we get a very, very smooth curve that sort of gives a really good idea of how our sound is overall, but for this application what we're doing here today, I'm going to leave it at around 6.

All right. One other mode on here is the threshold mode, and there's absolute, you can either control it with the slider or actually with the knob or with this slider on the side. And what this does is it sort of sets a level over which the plugin will stop seeing certain frequencies if they're below a certain level. So this lets you zero in on frequencies, and if we turn up the precision, you might actually be a little bit more able -- have the ability to see this. So right now, we're just seeing frequencies that are popping over that level. We can also adjust this relative meaning it'll only show us things that are relatively low compared to other frequencies surrounding it. So what this will do is we'll actually get more of a wider range because in areas that have less energy like a frequency range say between 400 and 500, we're seeing these peaks here because overall the energy in this range is less than the energy in this range so we're seeing more peaks over here. We'll turn that all the way down so we get to see everything and turn the precision back down just a little bit.

There's also a different cursor that you can use on here. Right now, we just have the hand cursor. If we go to this sort of X cursor and we go over the graph, up at the top here, we can see exactly the position, the mouse position over here. So, let's say we see this peak over here and we want to find what frequency that is exactly, 503, and right now that it's at 46 dB. Of course, remember we're using the offset for -20 dB so that the curve is closer to the center so we actually have to add 20 to that so that actually would be -26 dB.

All right. So that's the spectrogram at a glance. There's all sorts of things where you can make like your left channel a red line. It might be kind of hard to see but you can see a peak over here for the left channel that's red; it might be hard to see on the video though. We can also go into our spectrogram view, and for this view, I'm actually going to turn the offset back up. I really like this view. It's sort of -- What I'm going to say is that it's like a Doppler radar, and it shows you basically where the most energy is based on color, black being pretty much zero and as we get warmer and warmer, we see there's more energy around this area, just like we can see on the spectrum view. Now what this means -- this is sort of in the 100 Hz range between, let's see since we got our handy cursor here, between 80 Hz and about 150 Hz, we're seeing a lot of energy, maybe a little too much. So, in this view, I'm going to show you how you can even out your frequency response.

I'm going to open the equalizer, this is the Sonitus equalizer, and reset. There we go. So what I've done is turn down a sort of the peak filter or a peak band EQ, and it's attenuating 5.1 dB at 137 Hz with a Q factor of 1.2, and as you can see, there's a lot less red up here. We're seeing more of an even curve. And if we look at our spectrum view, we'll see the same thing, a very even curve up here. So, in this view, I'm going to toggle the notch filter off, so that's off, and we can see again that red starting to show up. Turn it back on, and there we go we have a lot less energy there.

Another cool thing to do in this view is raise the threshold. This is the absolute threshold. So, we're only going to see areas that pop up above a certain decibel value, when we're like this. So again, we're seeing most of our energy over -30 or so is in this area of the frequency band. What we're also seeing is a lot of energy down below like 40 Hz, and you know the human ear can only hear down to 20 Hz and 40 Hz is about twice that but it's still very, very low, extreme low we can barely hear it. It takes a lot of power to amplify anything that low. I mean anything below 300 Hz can be very, very tough on an amplifier and a speaker so down here it's even worse. And if we think about where this particular piece is going to be played, it's a web-based media so it's going to be played on small speakers, and those frequencies aren't even going to be recreated, so what we want to do is take out those frequencies.

So, what I'm going to do is turn on a high-pass filter, and we're going to see immediately some differences here. We're seeing more of that red though because this is actually slightly resonant so that it would sort of be more of a steep slope. So, what I'm going to do is turn down the resonance of that filter so now we actually can turn that down a little bit, and we can see once again less red but we're not getting much at all below 50 Hz or so.

Kick drum: Normally, you want it to peak around 80; anything below that, you really don't mean recording unless you're really going to be playing it through hi-fi speakers and what people can feel because you're not going to hear that anyway. So, as you can see it's pretty smooth but we're still getting a little bit of stuff down there, a little bit of junk that we don't really want, so I'm going to turn on one more bell EQ, and as you can see the curve just makes it a lot more steep. Turn that down a little bit and maybe even lower our filter just a little bit. Now we see it is very clean, this is all we're getting, and we'er not getting much at all below there, and if we actually turn this back on, we can see this is all green now, and this is sort of a frequency response that we can deal with. We're getting a little bit of red but that's just fine.

One other thing that we should check out in the spectrum view is this little guy right here. This line or this band has this little vertical line that's kind of dancing around back and forth, and what that is doing is showing you where in the stereo spectrum between left and right has the most energy, so it's sort of showing you where the center of your stereo image is. Now, this is based on a lot of different factors. It may not work all that well for all program material but it is a handy little thing to have. As long as you're not dancing all over the place, you should be pretty okay but of course maybe you do want that center image to move a lot.

There's also a freeze option, so you can just take a snapshot of what you're looking at; that works for the spectrogram as well, so you can see it's not moving anymore. Press it again and it starts moving again.

So I'm going to stop playback, and we're going to take a look at the output view. This is the last one. As we can see, there's three graphs on here. This is similar to the spectrum view but it also has that time aspect to it. Basically, this shows us what's happening in the left and the right and then the combined, summed center one. And it also has its own controls, each one of these have its own controls, and it also is reliant on these controls down here. I'm going to turn playback on again and we're just going to see what happens here.

So as you can see, as the left and right are fairly similar, I'm not seeing too many incredible differences. Of course, there's a hard panned guitar left and a hard panned guitar right but they're pretty much playing the same thing. You know, right now this pretty much is just -- let's see. Right now, this is pretty much just showing us the balance between left and right, and there are a lot of different things that you can do on this view. We're not going to be able to get to all of them, unfortunately, because we have limited time but that is the Blue Cat Frequency Analyst Pro VST at a glance so thanks for checking that out here at Gearwire.Com.