If you ever have time, Shooshie (yeah, right), I would love to watch and listen to a video of you working and explaining your way with FG-X. I would get a lot out of it, as would others. Of course, I think you should start your own training channel and charge for it. There's plenty of us who would pay.Shooshie wrote:Once I realized that you have to set FG-X's parameters to the loudness range in which you're working, I found it to be an amazing plugin. At first I wasn't getting much out of it, because I simply didn't know to set the dB ranges. The knobs are for fine-tuning, so you have to start out in the ballpark. That took me a week to figure out (duh!). But since then... man! What a monster plugin!
Don't be afraid to use it just because the upgrade might not recognize your user-presets. First of all, I'd be very surprised if it does NOT recognize your previous settings. Secondly, when that happens, I view it as a 2nd chance to get things even better than before, and it always seems to work that way.
In fact, I prefer dialing in my own settings in each project over using my saved presets. I think it helps you become familiar and confident in your ability to imagine an outcome and visualize the settings that will realize that outcome. I only make presets when I have to spread them out over dozens of instances, as in the mastering of an album's worth of material, or a lot of fiddle tracks, and that sort of thing. But from project to project, I tend to dial in all my settings at least once, before saving them and spreading them around.
And I think that's important enough to say again in another way: stay familiar with the interface, the controls, and always... always... the acoustic reasons for moving any control, any amount. It's easy to become dependent on a preset and forget even what it does or how you came about those settings. For example, it took me a long time to really and truly wrap my head around what's going on in Waves L3 MultiMaximizer. I finally set up a simple mastering situation and spent a couple of hours just setting things to extremes, then backing off and gradually learning exactly what result is going to come from each action in those controls. My mixes got a lot better when I did that. Now I use FG-X for most things, but I know when and why I reach for the L3 from time to time.
Don't let any plugin intimidate you. They are all learnable from an acoustic/physics-based approach, and almost always use pre-visualization to guide your hands on the controls. You hear what you want it to sound like, and you set it to sound that way. I said "almost always" because there's something to be said for the random results from playing around with the controls, but underneath it all should be a solid grounding in reality and the cause/effects of audio alterations in acoustic, analog, and digital settings.
That said, FG-X is one of the most fluid tools I own for getting whats in my mind's ear to come out my speakers. It seems to know what I want. That says a lot about its designer(s).
Shooshie
Too bad I don't rule the world.
