Abbey Road Studio Plugin
Christain Cobb
Yes that will work fine, you will be hearing the mono summed signal as played through two speakers in the actual studio. So due to acoustics and head position, you may still hear slight differences between your ears. That is expected.
All my old mixes before working in mono first were overly dense and my arrangements were weaker. Nx made a huge difference for me just by making mono workflow tolerable thanks to room simulation. I do that by folding the mix to mono with a plugin right before Nx.
A lot of night clubs still use mono setups so the music sounds the same wherever you are. Shopping centres are the same. Plus many PCs, TVs and sound bars have speakers placed so close together that they end up pushing most of the same air. So they may as well be mono to some respect as well too.
Jsut tried the mono mixing approach and that is really great advice. Thx again.
I have an additional question about NX. Whenever I open an Ableton Live project with NX the Head Tracker Window is automatically opening. Is there any chance to block this window, as I do not use any headtracker.
Additionally, Abbey Road has collaborated with makers of music production software, lending its name to a variety of plugins that emulate the equipment and musical instruments found within the studio.
Other units include the RS660, a brilliant combination of the EMI RS124 & Fairchild 660 compressors, and the TG12345 Curve Bender equalizer, which draws heritage from the famed TG12345 recording console. The Curve Bender and Zener Limiter are also available in plugin form from Softube, and I use them often during mixdown and even mastering.
The RS135 can add only 8 kHz, and there are two separate RS127 modules (one with an added transformer) that can boost or cut up to 10 dB at 2.7 kHz, 3.5 kHz and 10 kHz. Each can help on virtually any element in the proper context, but I really love them on acoustic guitar and for bringing presence to vocals.
In collaboration with Abbey Road Studios, Native Instruments sampled classic drum kits using recording techniques from six distinct eras in recorded music production, allowing producers and engineers to capture drum sounds that have found their way onto countless records dating back to the 1920s all the way to today.
Recorded using techniques that revolutionized the popular music industry, 50s Drummer gives producers the drum sounds of early rock and roll, jazz, rhythm & blues and country. Two rare kits from Gretsch and WFL were sampled with equipment from the 1950s, resulting in a sound that is both cutting and powerful.
As rock and roll continued to transcend popular music in the 1960s, the steady backbeat of the drummer came more into focus than ever before. 60s Drummer captures the unbridled energy of the decade with meticulously captured samples of Gretsch and Ludwig kits.
As recording fidelity improved in the 1970s, the trends in drum recording moved towards a more intimate, dry sound. 70s Drummer features a Premier kit captured with this tight, punchy recording technique, while also featuring a Ludwig kit with a more open, roomy sound.
Music from the 1980s was known in part for the gated drum sound, which was achieved at first by accident. 80s Drummer uses period accurate equipment to harness this famous room sound, which envelops huge, powerful Slingerland and Yamaha kits.
Lastly, for the unparalleled impact and detail found in contemporary productions, Modern Drummer features pristine kits recorded using tried and true techniques, resulting in a virtual instrument ideal for creating drums for modern pop, rock, country and more.
When it comes to signal processing, no plugin company has created more Abbey Road-inspired software than Waves. The entire collection features a dozen plugins including compressors, equalizers, saturators and more. My personal favorites include:
Abbey Road Vinyl, the super versatile vintage vinyl emulation tool that features two different turntables, three cartridges, the ability to change the tone arm position allowing for variable frequency response and distortion, as well as the charming noise, pops, crackles, wow and flutter that are a part of the vinyl sound. Abbey Road Vinyl works great on individual tracks or the mix buss. I mixed a hip-hop record recently and every song was mixed down with this plugin inserted and used to a degree.
J37 Tape, an emulation of the very machine used to create countless hits in the 60s and 70s. Features include three separate tape formulas, two tape speeds, controls for wow & flutter, as well as slap, feedback and ping-pong delay modes. The J37 works well to add analog characteristics to individual tracks, subgroups and the mix buss.
Learn WHY mixing on headphones is so hard and how Waves may have solved this problem ONCE AND FOR ALL with their NEW Ocean Way Nashville Virtual Mixing Environment plugin! This is the 3rd plugin released that use Waves Nx technology to accurately recreate a virtual studio in your headphones!
The software company, who recently released the popular Multimod, are extending their demo period to 90 days; a full three months to trial it. We covered the Abbey Road Studio 3 plugin last summer when we visited the world famous studio to hear the real experience and A/B it against Waves impressive recreation of the monitoring experience. Read our full review here.
Waves are currently celebrating 25 years of plugin development and remain committed to ensuring that Waves legacy plugins remain compatible. After a quarter of a century, with their fingerprints on countless records, some of the latest releases including the distortion modules, Bezerk, Screamer and MDMX Fuzz, have been well received alongside their new subscription plan.
In addition to the Abbey Road Studio 3 trial, Waves are offering 90 days on the Nx Virtual Mix Room over Headphones. Whereas Abbey Road Studio 3 creates, yes you guessed it, Abbey Road Studio 3, the Nx Virtual Mix Room provides an high end studio inside your headphones giving you the insight to make great mixes, anytime, anywhere. With the current inability to travel outside our homes, this is a great opportunity to try both of these and see how they can help your final mixes and masters.
The control surface of the plugin is pretty straight forward and is divided into four sections. In the upper row, there is the Waves preset management and A/B comparison function, known from other Waves plugins. For the Abbey Road Studio 3 plugin this is pretty much obsolete. Well, you could save presets for different users, if you share the same computer with peers. But other than that, there is no use for presets here.
Below the studio image you have three buttons for the speaker selection, which are labeled NEAR, MID and FAR. This is the section you are probably going back to most often while mixing, to switch between the three pairs of speakers and hear if your mix sounds good on all of them.
Now, like one would expect, you can choose between the two in the head tracking section via a drop down selector. There is also a settings button, which opens the Waves Head Tracker software for further adjustments.
There is not a lot to adjust. You can switch between the camera tracker and the Bluetooth tracker, which you can buy optionally. Like on the plugin itself, you can reset the face detection, in case the software caught your head in a skew position.
The three speaker sets sound pretty different, but they all sound big. There is no such things as Auratones or a boombox you could check your mix on. You can only test if your mix sounds good on all of these three very hifi sounding speakers.
At least they have some low cost models included, like the Sennheiser HD-280 Pro, which I also own. With that model, the EQ does a good job of turning that mid rangy sound of the headphones into a more balanced, wider sound with a bigger, more natural low end.
The headphone EQ helps mixes translate better to the outside world, provided that you own one of the 12 headphone models included. Fortunately they have included some inexpensive and fairly common headphones, but I really would like to see at least 10 times as much choice.
Waves and Abbey Road have teamed up once more and created a really inspiring and useful product. More and more people create music from their homes. That means that most music nowadays is not created in professionally treated studios, but in rooms that have all sorts of acoustic problems.
Acoustic treatment can be done to a certain degree in a home setup. But it takes time, knowledge and money to do it properly. You may even not have enough space to place acoustic elements in a proper position, due to furniture, instruments or equipment taking up that space.
Another big plus and at the same time the biggest miss of Waves Abbey Road Studio 3 is the headphone EQ. If you are the happy owner of one of the 12 headphone models included, than your mixes will probably translate a lot better, than without the headphone EQ.
But in the end, what counts is what works best for you. Feel free to try my setting (ASR3 and Reference 4 last on the master bus in that order). Chances are that your mixes translate better, than without the two plugins.
Abbey Road is a studio that needs no introduction. Forever enshrined in history by way of the Beatles eponymously-titled album Abbey Road, the studio has a storied past and has served as the creative hub for some of the most iconic recordings ever made. From the Beatles to Pink Floyd and more recent acts such as Massive Attack and Dave Omoregie (aka Dave), Abbey Road has become a revered studio of unrivalled sonic integrity.
This build-up could muddy a mix and make it difficult to distinguish sounds in the lower frequencies between 100Hz and 400Hz, a region in audio production that is notoriously difficult to find clarity within.
Next, route the drum loop to an auxiliary and install a reverb plugin set to 100 per cent wet. You can copy the settings below for a starting point or use a preset to achieve a standard plate or room with a 1.2 second decay time, or thereabouts.
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