Studio Assist - A great Tool For All Producers
Darcy Voutt, a young Producer / Software Developer from Toronto, Canada, had made a very impressive app called “Studio Assist“, which he coded himself. This is more like an all-in-one software for all producers and engineers, which provides Milliseconds Calculator, Scales & Frequencies, and Tempo Detection. let’s look at this app in detail and see what it provides to us.
What includes in Studio Assist?
Milliseconds Caculator
Syncing the song to the tempo is a perfect way to make the delays, reverbs, and compressors work in sync with the music’s groove. This is particularly useful for reverb decay and, my personal preference, reverb pre-delay. These principles can also be applied to compressor attack and release settings to give your songs a pleasant tempo-timed pumping effect.
So, why would we go to the trouble of doing those calculations in the first place? How important is it?
It causes your reverbs’ reflections and tails to dance and quantize to your music. Rather than being some arbitrary value you set by hand, the ambiance and room sound will now lock to your song’s tempo and shift in time.
With Studio Assist, you can get the right milliseconds instantly. All you need to do is to add your tempo and it will automatically give you all the information you need. It provides you the Standard, Dotted, and triplets notes and milliseconds, and all you have to do is to click on the number you want and it will copy and paste the clicked number onto your plugins.
With this software you save time and you can focus more on your productions rather than calculating numbers.
Scales & Frequencies
Knowing Scales are important for music producers, engineers, and musicians, just as learning grammar is crucial to speak properly. As a producer, we need to know the music scales in order to produce music, as this is the basis of music production. However, as mixing engineers, we also need to know about the scales and the frequencies of each note. for instance, when we use autotune on the vocal, knowing scales can help us a lot, as well as for tuning instruments or even when we use an EQ. So it’s crucial to have this knowledge.
Nonetheless, knowing not all of us to know this kind of stuff and it might be frustrating for some of us to start learning this sort of thing. But with Studio Assist, you can access all music scales with all frequencies for each note for the full octaves.
I, myself find it very useful while I’m using EQ, if I wanna tune or boost any fundamental frequencies, I just click on that specific note, and the value (frequency) automatically is copied, and I just paste it on my EQ, and BOOM! now I can perfectly tune my elements.
What Studio Assist provides is very helpful as a quick visual representation of the keys in your scale. It makes the process easier and more convenient.
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Tempo Detection
Then you’ll have another amazing tool, which is Tempo Detection. This is a super handy tool especially when you get a project from your client to mix and they just don’t know any details about the post-production or even the tempo. So with Studio Assist, you can get the BPM of any song in a second. Just upload your track, or beat here and it gives you the tempo. That easy!
GUI & System Requirements
Studio Assist provides 2 different theme color (Light | Dark) modes and you can change the font size. This software supports Windows & Mac OS (64 bits).
As my final thoughts about this software, Studio Assist is a wonderful time optimization application, and I personally find it very helpful. The GUI is very simple to use. It’s easy on your CPU and with just a few clicks you’ll get what you want. So I definitely recommend you guys to give this app a try and see how much time you’ll save with this tool.
Download 'Studio Assist'
You can download “Studio Assist” from the developer website (Linked Below).
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Why is it so critical to identify the correct pre-delay and decay time for your Reverb?
Often pro audio engineers adjust their reverb to match the tempo of the music they’re working on. You can quickly determine the pre-delay and decay time settings that are most likely to match the BPM of your song using this useful Pre-Delay and Reverb Time Calculator.
Choosing the right reverb Pre-delay time will make a difference between a lush rhythmic consistency and a reverberant clutter in your mix. As a result, the reverb blends in with the beat of the music, giving us the ability to make the source feel closer or further away from the listener.
In reverbs, what important parameters do I use this with?
Pre-delay
Pre-delay is one of the sweetest and most effective reverb elements you can use. When you hear sounds in a real space, the early, clear reflections of surrounding surfaces are what you hear first. Then you hear the reverb tail’s more ambient secondary echoes, which both mix together. The green early reflections can be seen in the graphic below, followed by the blue reverb body, or tail.
Decay time
The decay time is another parameter for which I use BPM syncing. This is how long the reverb tail takes to completely decay. That’s what’s known as the RT60 time of the reverb, or the amount of time it takes to decrease the amplitude by 60 decibels.
Let's see how this works!
Here’s a clear example of how we can get quarter notes/milliseconds on a tempo of 100 BPM:
60,000 divided by BPM (Beats Per Minute) = delay or reverb time (quarter notes).
ex: 60,000 divided by 100BPM = 600 milliseconds (.6 seconds) = (1 Beat)
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Create effective use of Pre-Delay & Reverb Time Calculator!
If you want to apply minor improvements to individual instruments with delay or reverb, I think the Pre-Delay & Reverb Calculator is fantastic. You can use the rhythm of your track to glue instruments together to add texture and interest while maintaining the song’s groove. Since music is an art form, and each song necessitates a unique approach, you can still use your ears to assess your chances.
Here is some additional TIPS!
- A song’s room reverb is often tuned to the snare. The target is for one snare hit’s reverb to die right before the next snare hits. If you’re in a 4/4 time signature and your snare lands on the 2nd and 4th notes, a half note pause is always a good place to start. You will use the whole note’s pause time as a max reverb time if your snare hits on the third beat. Use a medium- (600Hz) and a mid- (ca600Hz) cut on your reverb to help tidy up your blend. You should also use a compressor on your reverb send and sidechain it to the audio source to make the reverb disappear while your instrument is playing. More information about how to blend reverb can be found in this iZotope blog post.
A low-frequency oscillator (LFO) is an electronic system (or software) that generates a periodic pulse or sweep with a frequency of less than 20 Hz. This pulse is commonly used to modulate synthesizers, delay lines, and other musical equipment to produce sounds such as vibrato, tremolo, and phasing. The delay calculator displays the corresponding Hertz values for the different note values in addition to milliseconds. Try combining some of them with your LFOs to make cool effects that blend in with your music.
I found this post to be really helpful. The author provided useful tips that I will definitely put into practice.
Glad to hear that my friend, thank you for your support!