Mini Izotope Ozone Gating Tutorial

Just thought I’d post this in a separate thread seeing as it may be useful to many people.I could possibly post it in In-Depth, but it’s going to be short and sweet, and I don’t feel like it atm.

Below is the Multiband Dynamics tool in Ozone. It is quite possibly the most amazing thing you will ever see. This tool is responsible for exactly 50% of the coolness factor of Izotope Ozone, and quite possibly 100% of the coolness factor of the entire Internets. Yes, that’s right… Internets.

These tools allow you to use Ozone’s analog modeled Compressor+Expander(AKA:Compander) to change the volume dynamics of your song/sample/whatever at a multiband level… that is, it quite simply splits your sound into up to 4 frequency ranges, and deals with them separately. To solo one of these ranges, simply right click the small ‘M’ icon at the bottom right corner of its corresponding rectangle. Keep in mind you can drag around almost everything in Ozone, as well as the rectangle bounds shown here… yes, that was permission to change the frequency ranges if you like.

Like the internets, Sound often gets very cluttered, and needs to be dealt with accordingly. This is where Ozone’s expander comes in hella handy. YES THAT’S RIGHT, I’M COMPLETELY FSCKING IGNORING THE COMPRESSOR! DEAL WITH IT.

cough

… Sorry… I don’t know where that came from… back to what I was saying though. An Expander is “most often” used in a similar manner to a compressor. Fscking compressors, all shifty eyed and shit. Instead of suppressing the volume when it gets too high, however, expanders take a more sane approach and amplify the volume when it gets too low. That’s right folks, instead of killing dynamics from the top, you can kill 'em from the bottom. What we’ll be doing though, is using the Ozone Expander in a non-standard way. We’re going to use it as a non-brickwall gate that just happens to be multiband.

Below is a picture of ozone with Expansion set in such a way that it will gate:

Now, for the time being, please ignore everything but Thres Exp. and Ratio Exp. … the rest of the parameters should be left at whatever Ozone defaults to when you load the “Default” preset.

Now, please start by soloing the leftmost frequency range by right-clicking the “M” in it’s box. Mmmm box. Now, with a sample/song/whatever playing, drag the Thres Exp. over so you can see the dot moving in the graph to the right. It should be moving on a diagonal line. Nothing really sounds different. Now, drag the Ratio Exp. parameter to the right. THAT’S IT!! YOU’RE DONE!!! ALL THIS FOR THAT?!!??! Yes. You’ve just gated your bass. It should be effectively more punchy than before, and once you take it off solo, you may notice that your sound, although less bassy, seems to pump more. The low bass of course, can now be fixed with an EQ.

That’s all for now, I hope you enjoy. Fool around with the rest of the bands, and try gating everything. Also, check out the Multiband Harmonic Exciter to add a shitload of tube warmth, or even Tape saturation to your mix. Have a nice day! :D

can it sidechain ? :P

Unfortunately no… but that’s because Ozone is designed for mastering. I just also use it for sound design and mixing… I wish it did though ;)

lol, it was meant as joke :) Actually I am currently using sidechaining for the first time ever in a project although I had to hack quite a setup together because a simple side-compressor was not what I wanted and I couldn’t find a free sidechain-eq.

Thanks Byte-Smasher! Where can I get Ozone? (I’m google-less today)

YOU CAN GET IT FROM YOUR AUTHORIZED IZOTOPE RETAILER…



runs away

unless you have alot of “taschengeld” at the dark side of the internetz. But you better not.

For a moment there I was hoping it would be freeware… naive and no idm!

Nope, I don’t warezzz… I don’t even HAVE torrentz… I’m so 2005… ;)
Time to check the financial status… not to mention its priorities.

Well, Ozone is one of the few plugins I could justify paying for… as it can improve almost anything I do… and I can’t manage to do the same things with free plugs and have it sound as good. Perhaps that’s because I suck, but nevertheless, Ozone rocks my puny little world.

IZOTOPE OZONE $249.99!!!

wow…

BITTORRENT $000.00 ;)

izotope ozone is most probably worth it, since it includes a hole bunch of instances of sound editing. And its sound is superb troughout the whole line.

Ozone includes integrated tools for each step of the process: add broad equalization to balance the tone, multiband compression to control the dynamics, harmonic excitation to inject punch and sparkle, stereo imaging to sculpt the sound stage, loudness maximization to raise the level of the entire track to the standard for commercial use, and dither to maintain every last bit of quality.

7 in 1! it says on the web page. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

and btw. im a big fan of Izotope Phatmatik Pro.

I have iZotope Trash (paid for) and it has several features, among them Multiband Dynamics and Filters. Isn’t this the same thing? For cheaper?

Trash is tailored towards distortion… it can do the gate trick, but only supports 3 bands instead of 4… and the rest of the tools aren’t as useful for mastering. I have however, used it to distort <20hz on an indy band rock song to make a bass kick pop out of the mix more. Too bad the band members are assholes and will never hear my masters of their shit-poor tracks… but that’s another story :P

Basically, the rest of the kickass tools in ozone are just plain missing from trash… there’s no parametric EQ, no multiband stereo enhancer, and no sweet plate reverb… and although you can use the distortion settings in trash to multi-band excite a mix, it’s easy to get out of hand. And, personally, I find both ozone and trash are useful, but if I had to choose to keep one only, I’d choose ozone. Trash can do some f****ing sweet distortion though… it’s slowly climbing past guitar rig for my favorite distortion just because it’s cpu friendly and easy to use. I’m not fond of trash’s presets though, so I tweak everything myself.

I’ve put my soul up on EBAY, maybe soon I can buy Ozone :D

Nice tutorial!

Yes, I second that Izotope Ozone is one of those softwares you just run out to your local dealer and BUY. It’s well spent money. Ozone is extremely good, easy to work with and as a bonus looks nice within the Renoise environment too.

The thing I like most about Izotope’s software aside from how well it works, is the time they put into making the interface intuitive, and fast to use. There’s nothing I hate more than those plugins that try to emulate knobs and other odd hardware interface things like switches… there’s absolutely no reason for that shit… This is a digital realm people, there’s no need to try to copy real life when it’s damned inefficient to do with a mouse. Trying to rotate my mouse pointer around a point to get perfect cutoff sweep can be f****ing annoying. At least if you want to show a knob, make the mouse interface up/down instead of angular!!! Give me sliders & drag points or give me death!

100% owning your own song (provided you’re not using uncleared samples) = PRICELESS.

TRY BEFORE BUY ;)

Hahaha exactly!

H2O!!!

“And always remember! Don’t make money using warez software”

No, not make money, but save money. Thousands!

I think what they were also referring to is selling music made with cracked software. I never made huge bucks with my music, but whenever I got anything from it I immidiately spent most of it on soft/hardware for making music. Like one time I got some 150 bucks for a track I made for a DVD-Intro and I just donated this money in 15€ chunks to the freeware-plugin-developers that released plugs I use very often. I also paid for glitch for example because that was an amount of money I had at the time and I still think that dblue deserved it.

Also I don’t like the fact that I am stuck with some of my (warezed) software because a few plugs/programs have meanwhile moved to higher versionnumbers that I don’t like and the versions I use are not legally avaiable anymore. sucks.