MIKE PAYNE: Blue Cat Audio's FreqAnalyst Pro is a very cool and very free little frequency analyzer. FreqAnalyst is not only an accurate frequency analyzer but it has some interesting functionality like the ability to export signal data as MIDI allowing for some interesting creative effects. Let's dig in to that.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah. So let's take a look at FreqAnalyst.

MIKE PAYNE: The FreqAnalyst.

DAN AGOSTO: And I did a video on this already so we won't go.

MIKE PAYNE: Okay.

DAN AGOSTO: And there is actually another one coming up. There's a lot of features in this but, you know, it's just a slick looking plugin. Overall, I think that's the biggest thing about it, other analysts don't always look as good for this cheap.

MIKE PAYNE: Yeah.

DAN AGOSTO: So, we'll just play back something real quick.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS BACK A TRACK THROUGH BLUE CAT AUDIO FREQANALYST]

DAN AGOSTO: Here's the spectrum view. You can offset the -- basically the loudness so I can move it to a spot where it's easier for you to see. You can type in, you know, different levels for different things. Spectrogram is probably my favorite view.

DREW KRAG: Nice.

MIKE PAYNE: Nice.

DAN AGOSTO: Everyone likes that. You don't get that in every analyzer, and output. This is basically telling you the pitch center of basically each of your channels, so now it's getting silence so it's kind of freaking out, but if we go back. It's just telling you what's going on in each channel as far as pitch data.

MIKE PAYNE: Right.

DAN AGOSTO: And then their sum together. As long as you see they're pretty similar, you know you're doing all right. And pretty similar thing over, it's summing together the -- all the different frequencies and telling you where the average -- where the most energy is across both channels.

DREW KRAG: Ah, that's interesting.

DAN AGOSTO: So it jumps around and it's getting lower you see, so it gets -- when it's down there, that means that the whole spectrum is sounding, you know, bassier.

MIKE PAYNE: Right. Gotcha.

DAN AGOSTO: So, you know, if you know you want to -- your average to be around 500 Hz, you know, you can kind of use this to EQ it that way.

MIKE PAYNE: Nice. Nice.

DAN AGOSTO: So, we won't go into depth right now, but this brings up an interesting subject if you guys use a frequency analyzer, anything like this, visual aids, to help you do any sort of your work.

MIKE PAYNE: I generally don’t. Most of the work that I do, like I said before, it's hip hop, and when I'm composing an instrumental, generally I'm working with samples and things like that and I don't have to really get into anything like this until I get down to the master, so in that sense it could be, you know, pretty valuable to me but I just haven’t gotten into it. Part of the reason is I haven't wanted to spend money on one, and this kind of solves that.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah. This is a pretty affordable one. I think you can buy like all their plugins for like 300-something dollars and [OVERLAPPING].

MIKE PAYNE: And there is a free version of this?

DAN AGOSTO: With just FreqAnalyst, yeah, and there is also like digital peak meter.

MIKE PAYNE: Okay.

DAN AGOSTO: And there is a pro version of that. They do have, you know, some free plugins. Yeah, definitely one of the cool things you can do with this is set a parameter to, you know, to record basically an envelope data, and then you can assign that data to anything else, so you can kind of use it to basically to ride a fader for you.

DREW KRAG: Cool.

MIKE PAYNE: Nice.

DAN AGOSTO: What about you, Drew? Do you use?

DREW KRAG: I don't use it primarily for like mixing or anything like that. I do use frequency analyzers for actually figuring out what any sort of bias that my rooms have. I record in a lot of various types of rooms from like dead rooms to, you know, medium sized live rooms to very large live rooms, and what I'll do is I'll just take a very clean dry signal of an instrument and then record the same instrument in the big room, and then run them both through the frequency analyzer and see what frequencies become biased, see what frequencies pop out, and then I know a little bit more about the room I'm dealing with and how to record in it and more importantly how to fix it.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah. That's a pretty good idea. One thing that might be kind of cool to do is that you could do with the frequency analyzer like this is you could record say an impulse response. You guys know impulse responses.

MIKE PAYNE: Absolutely.

DAN AGOSTO: Record one for a nice room like the sweet spot between the speakers in a nice mixing room, and then bring that to your studio, play it back, freeze, you know, freeze the data that comes up, and then you can open up another frequency analyzer and use that to move your room EQ, the EQ for your room.

MIKE PAYNE: Interesting.

DREW KRAG: That's a good idea. That can make your room sound.

DAN AGOSTO: Definitely, and there's all sorts of things in here. There's a zoom feature that let's you really, you know, move in to the frequencies that you want to look at, and it gets pretty precise as well. You can control the precision to be low so you can sort of see, you know, how your ears would hear it but you can also turn it up really high and be really critical and really like sort of scientific about it, you know.

MIKE PAYNE: Right.

DAN AGOSTO: Because when there's like tiny little peaks, you know, it's more -- you don't really notice it. You more like feel it, so it allows you to tailor the data that you're seeing onto, you know, what you want to do whether you're mastering, you might use less precision, but if you're like EQing a room, you might use a lot more.

MIKE PAYNE: Right.

DREW KRAG: Sure.

MIKE PAYNE: Cool.

DAN AGOSTO: It's a pretty cool plugin, and we have one video up already and we will have another video up probably next week just because there is a lot that you can do with this so that you can -- There's this whole matrix up here that we even didn't get into in the last video.

DREW KRAG: This is Blue Cat. Is this free?

DAN AGOSTO: No. This is one of their paid plugins. You can get it from their site. They're all direct downloads from the Blue Cat Audio web site, so check out the Blue Cat Audio web site if you are interested in purchasing any of their plugins including the FreqAnalyst Pro.

MIKE PAYNE: And presently, they're just Direct X and VST, correct?

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah. That's it.

MIKE PAYNE: Gotcha.

DAN AGOSTO: So you got to have --

MIKE PAYNE: A wrapper or a PC.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah. I don't believe that --

MIKE PAYNE: You can wrap it on Mac.

DAN AGOSTO: Don't quote me on this but I'm not sure. I don't think they work on Mac.

MIKE PAYNE: Gotcha. Gotcha.