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14 Février 2021
Klanghelm VUMT update & VUMT Deluxe VUMT is a reliable analog style VU meter plugin that's useful for tracking, mixing and mastering applications. As a long-time user of VUMT was excited to hear about the latest update and thrilled to see what's in the Deluxe version. VU, RMS and PPM DIN (Type I) The RMS mode can be set to K-12, K-14 and K-20 scales and offers an integrated peak bargraph The Meter ballistics are fully customizable. The VU even has a unique overshoot parameter. Klanghelm is excited to release its first plugin today: VUMT: VU meter and trim plugin. It's available in both VST and AU format, 32Bit and 64Bit, Windows and OSX (Intel Mac). A standalone version of the plugin for Mac and Windows-PC is also included. It costs 5 Euro. The VU meter sheds some interesting light on this situation. It reads the average signal, measuring between the peaks that are given by your DAW meters and the troughs, resulting in a measurement that is much more accurate in terms of telling you how loud something really is. It is a metering plugin that painstakingly emulates the ballistics of analog style VU and PPM meters. The calibration of the meters and ballistics are customizable and the plugin also works in an additional RMS mode calibrated to the K-System. If you're not familiar with VU or PPM meters you can read more about them here.
YouLean is featured prominently on my master bus. This plugin will give you real-time updates as to the integrated, momentary, and short term LUFS value during playback. It's also very useful for keeping your True Peak levels in check.
As you can see on the right hand side of the below screenshot, YouLean actually plots a graph showing the historical LUFS vales of the song.
This isn't a loudness meter as such. It's a dynamic range meter that uses basic units such as peak and RMS. It's floating dynamic section is a very good indicator of where on the scale the energy of the song is at any given moment. It is especially useful if you are using the K-System for monitoring and serves as a guide to knowing the dynamics of the song you are mastering. The RMS meter can be calibrated to various frequency weightings as to get a better idea of the loudness relative to full scale as opposed to just simple RMS which is very sensitive to bass.
A very sophisticated loudness meter that allows you to set a ‘target loudness' which the meters respond to allowing to visually achieve your LUFS goal. It even features a PLR meter. PLR is Peak to Loudness Ratio, the difference between the integrated LUFS and peak value. PLR is good to know when optimising for loudness normalised streaming platforms.
Based on the design of classic VU meters of their time. I personally use this as slow RMS meter, very useful for balancing the louder parts of songs within the context of album mastering. It even features a mono maker for summing everything below a given frequency to mono.
This one is always good to look at when you have slight doubts or need validation of the general distribution of energy over the frequency spectrum. Generally speaking, you are looking for a reasonably flat response here rolling off at around 8k. However, this is a huge generalisation and should not be forced out of a given mix if there is energy lacking in some frequency domains. Use it as a reference. The same goes for all meters for that matter.
Sometimes I get to the goal quite quickly without the use of meters. Orban is unique in the sense that it's not actually a plug-in. It's in fact an app that allows you to get your loudness and true peak levels from a printed mix or master. This saves time as I don't have to play the song through just to know my LUFS values and such. Good for just checking the numbers after the fact and for comparing tracks.
Ian Shepherd and the good people at Meterplugs have created a solid range of metering plugins that go way beyond yesteryear's familiar standards. Their flagship plugins include Dynameter and Perception, helping you find the right balance between loud and dynamic, the sweetspot if you will.
It's very likely that your DAW features it's own meters. They will likely give you peak and RMS readings at least. As with all of these plugins, it's best to start using them with real material and learning how they respond to various types of music. I often drag things from my iTunes library to see what it looks like through the meters I use. This helps me paint a picture of what to work towards, especially when using reference tracks.
There is a lot more to mastering than looking at meters, but it doesn't have to be rocket science. If you are keen to learn more about mastering, here is a coupon for my Mastering Audio in Logic Pro X Course.
Happy mastering!
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VUMT Deluxe.
Painstakingly modeled behavior and recreation of the general ballistics of classic VU meters.
Contains three metering modes:
VU, RMS and PPM DIN (Type I)
The RMS mode can be set to K-12, K-14 and K-20 scales and offers an integrated peak bargraph
The Meter ballistics are fully customizable. The VU even has a unique overshoot parameter.
VUMT offers dedicated trim controls to make gain staging easy.
GUI-resizing and various options to hide the controls from the GUI and show the meters only and/or a single meter display.
Eight different skins to choose from. An editable instance label.
In addition to all the features of the standard version VUMT deluxe offers more metering types (BBC, DIN, Nordic) plus various channel tools, such as Mute and Polarity reverse buttons, a monitor section and the following signal processing tools:
HighPass and LowPass Filters, a single band dynamic EQ with various filter types, useful to remove resonances or for de-essing and a mono maker to narrow the stereo image below a certain frequency.
On top of that, each skin VUMT deluxe offers an additional contrasting GUI for the VU itself.
Available formats:
Windows: VST, AAX, Standalone (32bit & 64bit)
OSX: AU, VST, AAX (32bit & 64bit), Standalone (64bit)
This goes along with what MM said about avoiding recording too hot. A good friend of mine turned me onto this plugin as a means of tracking more effectively and efficiently back when I told him I'm going to get my hands dirty and try and learn a thing or two about mixing. It's really a great tool, but rather than tell you how to use it, I'll copy and paste what my buddy emailed me. It's very long, but contains great info for people who find themselves frequently messing with faders and tracking too hot:
Hey CaliMoose,
I forgot I was going to write you a summary of why and how I use that VU meter plugin.
So basically, it's a two part plugin, in that it is both an 'average level' meter and a trim plugin. The trim feature is pretty obvious, just cuts or boosts the digital gain of the signal, so softer or louder. This feature is really nice to have in a meter plugin, because it all takes up only one FX slot in your DAW.
The meter side of things is the good bit. So most DAWs as I've found out, only read Peak signals. This means they show you only the maximum level your tracks are reaching at any point in time, or in other words measuring the peaks. However, this is really deceiving and doesn't accurately portray the perceived loudness of the track. For example:
Say you have a distortion rhythm guitar and a lead guitar. You play them back and on your meters, the distortion guitar chugging along with power chords only peaks around -18 to -16 dBFS. Meanwhile, your lead guitar, doing some nice soloing is peaking a little higher, around -10 to -8 dBFS. Yet, for some reason the lead guitar with its higher peaks sounds even quieter. So you raise the fader or use a plugin with some sort of output gain to make the solo louder, but now the peaks are as high as -5 to -3 dBFS. It sounds right, but it doesn't look right, it looks too alarmingly hot. This is is the very situation that has always plagued me.
The VU meter sheds some interesting light on this situation. It reads the average signal, measuring between the peaks that are given by your DAW meters and the troughs, resulting in a measurement that is much more accurate in terms of telling you how loud something really is. In the situation above, chances are with the faders level, the lead guitar will have a lower VU meter rating than the distortion guitar, despite the lead guitar having higher peaks. To visualize this, look at the waveforms of each track on the timeline. THe distortion guitar probably looks like a solid bar with little fuzzy peaks. This tells us that it is heavily compressed by nature of the distortion effect and that there is little distance between the peaks and troughs. Thus there is less dynamics and the overall perceived loudness is much higher. The lead guitar on the other hand probably has a wave form with large peaks that are far from their respective troughs. Zooming out on the wave form, you can kinda get a feel where the main 'body' of the wave form is in relation to the peaks, a kind of visual average. You'll see it's actually quite smaller than the distortion guitar, thus is perceived as less loud. What the VU meter is doing is a mathematical/numerical average just like you did with your eyes. It's comparing the peaks to the troughs and telling the reality of how the loud the track is in your mix.
Thus, to save yourself a lot of hassle, it's a great idea to track with the VU meter! If you track all your guitars, bass and vocals using the plugin instead of you DAW's meters, you'll get a much accurate representation of how loud you are recording. The VU meter is adjustable, but I'd keep it at it's stock calibration, which deems 0 dBVU as -18 dBFS (the digital sweetspot so to speak where your A/D converters have the best signal to noise ratio). I would try and track all things to just under the '0 dBVU' mark. If the needle is moving around -2 or so, with occasional dips into the red, then you know your getting an optimal signal into your DAW. If the clip light is going off, before you get a level of 0 dBVU, particularly on vocals and lead guitars where you have a lot of dynamics, then record as far up the meter as you can before the clip light goes off.
In the instance of clipping before reaching your 'digital sweetspot' at 0 dBVU, this is where your friend the compressor comes in! The compressor serves to decrease the distance between the peaks and troughs, lowering the dynamic range and thus allowing you to bring an incoming signal closer to 0 dBVU before clipping occurs.
If by accident you've recorded something a little too hot or too quiet, the trim function comes back in as your friend. For example, if you recorded a vocal a little hot, then use the trim to pull it down a bit, this way it won't feed into your next few plugins at too high a level. Likewise, a little boost from the trim can help a weaker signal sound better, because it will run through any processing plugins after the trim at an optimized level.
I think if you experiment recording and mixing with the VU meter you'll find things sit a lot better in your mix. Also, you'll rediscover your faders as I have done! My goal when prepping a mix, is to get all of my individual sound sources sounding as good as possible, using the VUMT plugin to ensure they're right at the digital sweetspot. Of course, if everything is at 0 dBVU you'll clip the mix bus! But that's okay, now that your individual sound sources are at the sweetspot when their fader is at 0, lowering their faders will correct the issue (and because the fader attentuates volume after your plugins, it won't effect your gain staging between processors). From there, I'd simply select all the tracks, and bring all the faders down until your mix bus reads -2 dBVU (using the VUMT plugin on the Mix buss too), which is about -20 dBFS RMS, or average. Then I'd either inch up or down individual faders until everything was right in the mix. For example, when you pull all your faders down, everything is at the same level. Likely, you'll want to raise a few things to make them stand out, which you can now do because the faders have room to go up and you have headroom on your mix bus! So now you can feel more natural in pulling up say the kick drum or the lead vocals. In the end, as you raise a few things up, your mix will settle right around the the 0 dBVU (-18 dBFS) sweetspot, which is also the optimized level for exporting for mastering
I hope this helps! I can easily show you the next time we meet up this whole process. I really think this understanding of levels has transformed my mixing/recording and is the most essential thing!
Best,
CaliMoose's friend
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