BILL HOLLAND: We’re back on Gearwire.Com with the Izotope Ozone 3 plugin. Mastering has long been viewed as one of the mystical arts of audio production but with the birth of the home studio and release of plugins like the Waves plugins and iZotope’s Ozone 3, that’s changed quite a bit.

Now, I have a project opened here in Logic, and I’m going to go down to the track that I’ve opened and go to my inserts, select my audio units iZotope Ozone 3 stereo. Now, in a second here, you’re going to see the Ozone 3 pop up. There it is, and it’s brought up a preset window in the iZotope Ozone 3.

Now, Ozone 3 can be used either as an independent plugin. You’ll notice there are a pair graphic equalizers, a mastering reverb, loudness maximizer which is essentially a limiter, multiband dynamics like compressors, multiband stereo imaging for widening the shape of the waveform, and a multiband harmonic exciter. So, all in all there are seven plugins here that are integrated into one interface surface.

So, what I’m going to do, I’ve already opened up my project in Logic, we’re going to explore some of the presets that come with the Ozone 3. Now, we’ve loaded a basic track provided by Owen O'Malley into the time line. You’ll notice here I have input and output signals coming from Logic, and we’re going to just put a four-band drum preset and then see what happens.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A TRACK IN LOGIC WITH THE IZOTOPE OZONE 3 ENGAGED]

To get an idea of the change that I made, let’s go down to our bypass switch and turn that off.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A TRACK IN LOGIC WITH THE IZOTOPE OZONE 3 BYPASSED]

So, you can see how that’s already beefed up our track, but we can go through all of these presets and see what some of these do. Now, you’ll notice that right here we have the choice to turn the different parameters off. If I want to turn the EQ off for example.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A TRACK IN LOGIC WITH THE IZOTOPE OZONE 3 ENGAGED]

I can do that. I can also turn off my maximizer.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A TRACK IN LOGIC WITH THE IZOTOPE OZONE 3 ENGAGED]

So, you can see the difference that all of those make. Now, let’s go through some of these really quickly. We have a four-band punchy dynamic.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A TRACK IN LOGIC WITH THE IZOTOPE OZONE 3 ENGAGED]

And there are also sound effects like a bad phone signal.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A TRACK IN LOGIC WITH THE IZOTOPE OZONE 3 ENGAGED]

Basic CD mastering presets.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A TRACK IN LOGIC WITH THE IZOTOPE OZONE 3 ENGAGED]

If that still sounds too flat or not wide enough, we can go to the CD master with exciter and widener.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A TRACK IN LOGIC WITH THE IZOTOPE OZONE 3 ENGAGED]

Now, if we’re doing voice-over work, we can also use the commercial voice or compressor for voice but we’re not going to use that for this song. There are even presets for genres of music like country, which has a very distinct Nashville sound.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A TRACK IN LOGIC WITH THE IZOTOPE OZONE 3 ENGAGED]

It doesn’t really work for this song though. We can also do dance music.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A TRACK IN LOGIC WITH THE IZOTOPE OZONE 3 ENGAGED]

Delay widening.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A TRACK IN LOGIC WITH THE IZOTOPE OZONE 3 ENGAGED]

And you can EQ for separate instruments like an acoustic guitar.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A TRACK IN LOGIC WITH THE IZOTOPE OZONE 3 ENGAGED]

We can boost the treble.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A TRACK IN LOGIC WITH THE IZOTOPE OZONE 3 ENGAGED]

An exciter with three-band sparkle.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A TRACK IN LOGIC WITH THE IZOTOPE OZONE 3 ENGAGED]

Warmth.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A TRACK IN LOGIC WITH THE IZOTOPE OZONE 3 ENGAGED]

Or we can just go very, very easy on this. If it’s already up, you’ll notice there’s not a lot of headroom in this clip so I can actually use just gentle compression with some widening.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A TRACK IN LOGIC WITH THE IZOTOPE OZONE 3 ENGAGED]

You can hype the highs and the lows.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A TRACK IN LOGIC WITH THE IZOTOPE OZONE 3 ENGAGED]

And then sometimes you can get unintentional effects from things like, for example, “In Your Face Jazz Bass”. I play back this track with that and it sounds like this.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A TRACK IN LOGIC WITH THE IZOTOPE OZONE 3 ENGAGED]

Now, there are some more extreme effects. If I go down here, I can do a loud brick wall which this is the sort of pop-punk mastering you’ll hear on a lot of recent tracks.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A TRACK IN LOGIC WITH THE IZOTOPE OZONE 3 ENGAGED]

And if I need that kind of commercial loudness, I can actually take the output up probably farther than it should go right now. We’re at 3.0.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A TRACK IN LOGIC WITH THE IZOTOPE OZONE 3 ENGAGED]

You can also do a few different things here. You can do an overall mix master. You can mix for orchestra and master for orchestra.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A TRACK IN LOGIC WITH THE IZOTOPE OZONE 3 ENGAGED]

You can add tube saturation.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A TRACK IN LOGIC WITH THE IZOTOPE OZONE 3 ENGAGED]

Now, to hear the difference with some of these, let’s really quickly go down the rest of the list and I’ll turn the bypass on and off.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A TRACK IN LOGIC WITH THE IZOTOPE OZONE 3 ENGAGED]

Original.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A TRACK IN LOGIC WITH THE IZOTOPE OZONE 3 BYPASSED]

New one.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A TRACK IN LOGIC WITH THE IZOTOPE OZONE 3 ENGAGED]

We’ll also look at the original clip again and we’ll go to tape saturation.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A TRACK IN LOGIC WITH THE IZOTOPE OZONE 3 ENGAGED]

Original.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A TRACK IN LOGIC WITH THE IZOTOPE OZONE 3 BYPASSED]

And new.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A TRACK IN LOGIC WITH THE IZOTOPE OZONE 3 ENGAGED]

Now, one thing to keep in mind with this plugin of course is that louder does not always mean it’s going to be more dynamic and feel louder. In the end, making it louder may even crush that signal and make it feel flat all the way across, so you want to be careful with that. Now, with this particular clip, it’s more of a rock song so they have a rock master preset.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A TRACK IN LOGIC WITH THE IZOTOPE OZONE 3 ENGAGED]

And they also have a preset similar but with excitation, EQ, and widening.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A TRACK IN LOGIC WITH THE IZOTOPE OZONE 3 ENGAGED]

Now, notice that for each of these plugins there is a corresponding light on for every plugin that’s being used, so here it’s not using the reverb. Paragraphic EQ is on, loudness maximizer is on, multiband stereo imaging is on, multiband dynamics are on, and the multiband harmonic exciter is on. However, the mastering reverb is not. If you want to add that to this preset, you could actually save it as a new preset and have that reverb, so if I add the reverb...,

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A TRACK IN LOGIC WITH THE IZOTOPE OZONE 3 ENGAGED]

And I can actually, I clicked add, and that’ll add a new preset and I can save this as “Rock Master with Reverb” and it’ll add that to the presets.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A TRACK IN LOGIC WITH THE IZOTOPE OZONE 3 ENGAGED]

And you’ll notice right now I have the reverb selected. This red button selects everything. Let me show you real quick what these are. Click OK here. You have the EQ, mastering reverb, loudness maximizer, multiband harmonic exciter, multiband dynamics, and multiband stereo imaging. Now, there are a wide range of things that we’ve done with the Ozone 3, so I’m going to divide it up into each separate plugin. We’re going to go over to the EQ, reverb, maximizer, harmonic exciter, dynamic, and stereo imaging all separately in different videos on the site, so look to Gearwire.Com for more videos on the Ozone 3. {I’m Bill Holland and this has been a basic overview of the iZotope Ozone 3 plugin.