hey what's going on out there I'm Sean Divine hope you all are doing well in this tutorial we
are going to be covering a lesser spoken about functionality and feature of the famous Avalon
vt 737 sp Channel strip which I have here in front of me now whether you're utilizing the
analog Hardware which I have here or you're using the more recently released plug-in from
uad the functionality is the same now this is one of the most debated Channel strips it's been used
on countless hit records some Engineers love it others not so much the main complaint is
usually that the compressor is slow and limited however I'm one of those people that in my studio
experience this thing always just tends to give you a great result and it's hard to get a bad
sound out of it however the functionality that we're going to look at today I would argue makes
it one of the more versatile compressors and tone Shapers it's going to save you a ton of
time in the mixing process and has really become an invaluable tracking tool for me with the 737
so let's go ahead and dive in all right so we're taking a look at the front panel of the Avalon 737
this is the EQ section first thing we want to do is just hit our equalizer in button that activates
the EQ I'm going to go ahead and just boost up the treble just a little bit get a little air up here
at 20K 32k signature air bands here on the 737 and then we can also go and we can adjust our base a
little bit if we want to add some low end or in this case I'm going to take a little bit out we've
got a little bit of low mud there so these are going to function independently of what we do with
sidechain mids which is activated by this button right here so we click on and you'll notice that
when we hit that these bands here are not going to do anything okay so that is switching in these two
bands to trigger the compressor or to more finely Focus the compressor on the frequencies that we
set here and then it will dynamically control those so if we look at the markings here on the
EQ for the low mid and the high mid bands you're going to see our frequencies written here now if I
set this to for example right here at 1K on the high mid with these buttons off that's exactly
what this is going to control or to trigger the compressor now really powerful thing about the
EQ here in the Avalon is if we hit the x10 button that will multiply these markings by 10 and we'll
then set that to that frequency so for example 1K then becomes 10K so if I want to Target let's
say 7 or 8K which is going to be the problematic area of some s's I can just hit X10 and set this
somewhere between 550 and 1K and that's actually going to be more towards about 7K or 8K right and
if you're not quite sure what frequency you want to Target just turn off side chain mid and then
just boost that frequency so you're going to hear as I boost that our s's start to get really harsh
so I know I've dialed that in where I want it now these work together so you can actually set this
and this we're just going to use the high mid today but just to get your wheels turned in you
could Target 7K to tame and then also let's say you had some harshness at like 2K 3K you could
also set that band now to get side chain mids to trigger the compressor we need to aggressively
boost this band now so I'm just going to set that to about 10 DB something like that and I'm
also going to activate High Q that's going to give us a more narrow slope on the frequencies
that are being controlled there so it's going to be more specific and more finely tuned to this
frequency that we've selected here with the high mid band now we're sliding over to the compressor
section and we want to go ahead and just turn the compressor on right now with the ratio at
one to one and the threshold set like this there's going to be no gain reduction right now we're just
seeing the Vu meter signifying our signal no pun intended but if I select this button this
is going to now monitor the gain reduction of the compressor so you can see we're at zero but when
you're setting this the side chain mids mode and you want to see how much taming is happening we
want to go ahead and activate that so we can see the gain reduction shown on our Vu meter now I've
experimented with the sidechain mids mode quite extensively and I found that setting the attack
and the release time to as fast as it will go here I don't have the baby face mod or anything like
that but it's plenty fast for this and then I also will set the compressor ratio to something quite
High more towards like what a limiter would do I like to set it at 10 to 1 and then we're going
to slowly burning the threshold back until we start until we start until we start start to get
some gain reduction on our s's specifically so you can see over here our meter is now reacting quite
heavily to the S's S's and you want to set that until you're getting you know about three four
maybe five DB at the most as far as tracking you don't want to do anything too aggressive with that
the idea here is just to tame that during tracking and just kind of even out some performance issues
maybe some Sonic issues in terms of the microphone or the vocalist itself but you don't want to get
too aggressive with what you're doing here during tracking just as an example we can select two
different active bands for the dynamic EQ here so if I go ahead and we boost this one say at 450
times 10 that's going to be at 4.5k then I boost this that will also reduce that range at the same
time so we're going to get a lot of compression up there in that upper mid section and just control
that so I'm just adjusting the threshold a little bit so that we are fine-tuning that so no matter
what mic you have or what vocalist your deal dealing with utilizing that Dynamic processing for
two different bands and having control over all those different frequencies it just allows you to
sonically control your signal in a very powerful way there's really not a lot of analog Hardware
compressors out there that will give you that much flexibility as far as a dynamic processor which is
really really useful for tracking and getting the best performance out of your vocalists alright so
with that we have uncovered a lesser spoken about feature in the Avalon 737 which is the side chain
mid mode utilizing those two bands of the EQ and then triggering the compressor to tame problematic
frequencies in a very precise way those of you out there who are dealing with some issues in
terms of your microphone your performance you can really dial this in and get a sound that's
going to work so much better coming into your DAW and in the mixing process going to save
you a tremendous amount of time if you have any questions about how we utilized side chain Main
mode into the 737 feel free to let us know if you learn anything in the video please like subscribe
and consider sharing hit that notification Bell for more we'll talk to you soon [Music]