iZotope has some incredible plugins that can help you to quickly mix your track and get
great results even if you're new to the world of recording and mixing and they put all of their
best plugins into a bundle called the izotope music production suite pro and this means you
can use all of these incredible tools without shelling out thousands of dollars up front and
this video is actually the first in a series where i'm going to be looking at the individual plugins
that are included in the music production suite pro and in this particular video i'm going to be
looking at three ways you can use izotope neutron pro in your mixes i'm zane welcome to audio tech
tv where it's my goal to help you conquer the tech so you can unleash your creative beast
now this video is sponsored by izotope but these are plugins that i've actually purchased and i
use them and believe in them i've included a link down in the description in case you want to get
any more information on the bundle itself or the individual plugins that are included but right now
let's look at the three ways you can use izotope neutron pro in your mixes so first i just want
to quickly talk about the difference between izotope neutron pro and izotope neutron 3 advanced
with the pro plugins that you get with the music production suite pro
you are always up to date so if izotope were to release version four of their plugins next
week you would get that included with your subscription whereas if you owned
neutron 3 advanced you would have to purchase the upgrade you'd probably get a discount on it
but you don't automatically get it so that's really the difference between the pro
and the advanced plugins now let's look at the first way that we can use izotope neutron pro on
a track and this is with the track assistant and this is ai assisted technology which will detect
the audio source that you have going through it and then it's going to make suggested adjustments
based on what it hears and it's very easy to do this so if you have no mixing background
or anything you could quickly get started with these plugins and see what they're doing and
then you can learn as you go so let's just walk through how easy it is to get that set up so
i have neutron pro loaded up on a drum track right here and this is what it looks like when you first
load it onto a track there's nothing really going on in here so we want to click on mix assistant
and here we want track enhanced click next then from here you can go to auto detect and it's going
to auto detect whatever instrument you used or you can go in and set it up i'm going to set it up to
drums so it knows in advance what it's going to be searching for and then here we can go to
do we want it warm balanced or up front i'm just going to go with balanced and intensity do we want
it low medium or high again i'm going with the middle medium click next and now it's saying it's
waiting for us to play our audio so we're going to play our audio and it's going to detect it
all right so you can see that it's added the sculptor here the equalizer the exciter
and a compressor so let's play this back
and i'll do the bypass as it goes so we can hear the difference with it on and off
all right so you can hear a difference when i bypass it it's doing something in there and i
think what it really does is cleans up some of the muddiness of the drums and of course you can go
in here and fine tune any of the settings you want you can even load in more modules if you wanted to
or if you didn't even want to use this mix assistant you can actually
just load up the individual modules that you want and set it up however you want and there's even
presets in each individual module so you can click here and you'd see we have all of these presets in
here maybe we wanted to use one of those there's also overall presets for the entire plugin
so we could go into here drum bus acoustic and then we would go to basic drum bus say
and you can see it's changed things up based on
this preset so let's just give that a listen right now
so you can hear a few of those presets in there they do make a difference so now we've looked
at one way that we could use neutron that's using that mix assistant or using the presets now let's
look at the second way that we can use izotope neutron pro in a mix and it's something that i
sort of hinted on in the last one it's using the individual modules and you can use them like i
showed you you can add individual modules into this master plug-in that houses all the modules
or you can load them up as individual plug-ins and i'm going to show you that right now so i'm
going to take neutron pro off of this track and now i'm going to load up one of the modules so
you can see in here i have the individual modules that i can load up if i wanted to
there's the equalizer if i load that up it just brings up the individual equalizer module into its
own window so it's not housed in that other plugin and you can see i can access the presets in here
if i really wanted to so let's just load something up on here so you can hear what it sounds like
and that's just something i quickly put there i wouldn't actually use that in a track
but you can load as many of these modules throughout your project
however you want now let's look at the included modules so first up we'll look at the sculptor and
this is a spectral shaping tool that can remove muddiness and reduce harshness on your tracks and
really just make your tracks sound the best that they possibly can it's basically like an extreme
multi-band compressor that can have up to 32 bands that you can control instead of the typical four
that you have on a multi-band compressor so this is the sculptor here you can see there's some
preset things that we can toy around with click on that and it would set it up for drums there's also
presets over here that you could access and that's your sculptor now next up we have the compressor
and you can see we can have two instances of the compressor within the master plug-in here
but we'll just look at the one compressor because they're both the same so with this compressor it
might look simple but it's actually quite nice you can enable the vintage mode if you want so
it has two modes the default mode is the digital mode as soon as you load it up or you can enable
vintage mode by clicking there and that kind of gives it a little more character similar to like a
vintage compressor would have whereas the digital one is going to be a more transparent compressor
and you can see we have our typical compression controls you have your attack release ratio
makeup gain and then your threshold is controlled by using this bar right here
now you also have a mix control on here and you can control the knee of the compression
as well which is nice and then over here you can see we have side chain so you can
use this as a side chain compressor as well if you want to see how much gain reduction you're
doing you can see it on this meter here so let's just have a look at that right now
and another cool thing about this compressor is that you can use it as a multi-band compressor
if you go to this bar here you see the plus sign you would just click wherever you want to add a
node and then you can click again to add another node so you can have three different sections of
multi-band compression and to control them you would just click on the first node here
this section here if we want to control that we would just set the threshold there
click into this section and we'd set the threshold maybe down there then do the same thing for this
section however you want to control it and you can change these around however you need and
you can even bypass the compression for a specific section by just turning it off there so that's the
compressor now let's look at the equalizer so this is actually a really nice eq is great for surgical
stuff and it can also be used for some character stuff as well as i will show you so you can see it
starts out with four bands but you can add more as you need and of course you can control them
however you want to control them now there's this soft saturation and this acts like an exciter and
it can make your track sound a little more full there's also this cool feature called the masking
meter now if you had other instances of this relay plug-in or maybe other instances of neutron on
other tracks and you want to see if maybe some frequencies are interfering with one another
you could enable this and we'll say acoustic guitar here and now we can look and see if there's
some frequencies that might be overlapping just going to bring these down we'll give this a listen
and you can see in there where the frequencies are overlapping and you can make some adjustments
based on that if you really wanted to and if that wasn't enough for you with this eq
you can also use it as a dynamic eq so you can go in here enable the dynamics threshold and all that
fun stuff plus you can also use it in sidechain chain mode as well it's a very nice eq and you
might find yourself reaching for this one quite a bit once you get it now next up we have our
exciter and this can help to accentuate your track by adding harmonic distortion and one of the cool
things about this exciter is it has four different profiles you can see retro tape warm and tube
and the cool thing is you don't have to choose just one you can move this xy controller around
and have a little bit of tape and a little bit of retro still in there some tube and warm just
adjust it however you want and you can even adjust the mix of the exciter as well it's a pretty cool
module and worth checking out if you get neutron pro now the next module in here is the gate and
you can use this to get rid of any unwanted noise on your tracks or use it as a creative gate effect
it has fairly straightforward controls it even has a learn function if you want to use that
and you also have sidechain capabilities with the gate which is cool now the next module is
the transient shaper and you can use this to alter your tracks attack and sustain now
to be honest i don't typically use a transient shaper it's something i want to get more into but
with this one they make it pretty easy to use you can just choose maybe one of these presets in here
choose that one and then you can click the learn button and then if we play it
you can see it learns some of the settings that you might want so it's something that
you might want to try playing around with i know it's something i want to get more into myself
so that's the second way that you can use neutron is with the individual modules and
like i said you can load them up as individual plug-ins on your track or use them as the modules
within the main neutron plug-in itself and you can build a nice chain in there and maybe even
save it as a preset if it's something you want to continue to use over and over again you'd have
all of the settings saved for each module and that makes it nice and easy to use so now let's look at
the third way that we can use izotope neutron pro and that's to set up your overall mix so
before you start adding plugins adjusting volume panning anything like that you want to make sure
that all of your tracks levels are ideal and your panning is ideal and then you can get
into all of that detailed mixing stuff and you can see i have these relay plug-ins loaded up
onto pretty much every track in my project so this relay plug-in comes with izotope neutron
and it's basically a relay to the neutron plug and it kind of works in conjunction with neutron
and what you want to do is when you load it onto a track you want to give it a name in here so it's
named after whatever track it's on and this is going to make it a lot easier for you to work with
now i went ahead and did all of that already and i haven't touched any settings you can see
all of my levels are at zero in here so now the next thing that we want to do is go to our mix
bus or master bus or master track whatever it's called in your daw you can add the visual mixer
and that's going to look like this again this is another plugin that's included with neutron
and you can just click on mix assistant and then it tells you basically what i just told you is
to insert relay onto each track that you want to control and you want to make sure that your volume
and your panning is all set to zero or unity so nothing is changed then we click begin and you can
see over here these are all the tracks that it's going to control if there's anything you don't
want it to include then you would uncheck it but i'm going to leave everything checked in here and
if you want to bring something into focus like say our lead vocals and maybe our lead guitar as well
then we could put the star right there and i might also want to put that on the drums as well
so the next thing you want to do is click the begin listening and you want to play
your track all the way through you don't want to miss anything so make sure you start playing
your track from the beginning all the way to the end and then it's going to make the suggestions
based on everything that is heard so i'm going to do that right now but i'm going to
fast forward to when it's done in the video so i don't bore you with the whole track
all right so that's the whole track played back and you can see that we have some sliders
here that we can adjust like we can adjust the focus if we want to bring the focus up
of those tracks that we wanted to focus on we would do that voice if we wanted to bring voice
up we could do that bass all of this stuff so let's just listen to what it's done here
on me
all right so as you can see it's just really adjusted the levels it hasn't done any eq'ing
or anything like that it's just kind of adjusted our levels to get us into the ballpark of where
we want to be with our track so we can just click on accept and now you can see over here we have a
list of all of our tracks and i'll just click on one of these the acoustic guitar and one thing
you'll notice that is in the center here it's kind of like a fader so you can see you have 0 db
and wherever the track is is based on whatever levels that this has set for you so if you wanted
to adjust it manually you can actually hold down shift on your computer keyboard and click
up and down if you want and put it wherever you think it should be and you can also
adjust the panning by bringing it over whatever side you want to bring it to so typically
i will pan my guitars so i'm going to do that here guitar 2 bring that over here
and i'm just going to leave everything else the way it is and so now our mix is really ready to
start mixing we have ideal level set for all of our tracks and we're ready to go so we can
start adding our compressions our eqs and all the other fun stuff like saturation whatever it is you
like to use in your mix you can start adding that now so as you can see izotope neutron pro
is more than just a single plugin and even if you don't want to use any of those ai settings like
the mix assistant or anything like that you can use the individual modules and get great results
with your mix now if you want to check out a track that i mixed using only the izotope plugins
click the video on the screen right now or click the one under it to see what youtube recommends
if you like this video please give it a thumbs up also subscribe to the channel for more videos
like this thank you so much for watching for audio tech tv i'm zane keep creating and we'll talk soon