FabFilter User Forum
Pro-L: Somewhere between Transparent and Punchy
This is actually a couple feature requests and I don't know if either of them are possible or would sound as nice as I imagine.
With the music I am working on I'm having difficulty choosing between Transparent and Punchy. In general though I lean toward Punchy on the bass and drums and Transparent for higher frequencies. For acoustic guitar which sits on the border I am the most split. If I think of my vocals as a sort of sonic gradient, Transparent does a beautiful job of maintaining that smooth gradation where each increment is visible. Absolutely love it. Punchy on the other hand distorts the gradients on instruments, but you get the punch instead. It's a tradeoff. Also, the distortion of the gradient results in a sort of rounding or smearing (know idea what the proper term would be) of the sound which is actually nice in some instances.
So a couple a requests:
1. An algorithm somewhere between Transparent and Punchy.
2. The ability to break the frequency spectrum into a couple bands so that I could apply punchy around 200k or so and below and transparent above that.
Cheers!
Oh, and another trade-off I forgot to mention with Punchy is that in trade for the loss of detail it makes everything softer up the entire spectrum. So you can listen to the result longer with less fatigue. Well, punch can have it's own fatiguing effect, but anyway, so difficult to decide.
Is there anyway that a slider could be implemented between the two algorithms in order to find the sweet spot between them or are they just too different to do something like that?
Hi Greg,
The algorithms are very different so it would be difficult to smoothly mix between them. We'll consider your suggestions though.
Cutting the spectrum in multiple parts and applying different algorithms to each part is interesting, but keep in mind that you wouldn't be able to limit in this way: the algorithms can't guarantee that the sum of the result will be limited below the desired output level.
Cheers,