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Oops. I goofed -- Time Alignment vs. Phase Coherence
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I goofed yesterday and I feel very embarrassed about it. I was editing my Take Three email "3 most common Phase myths" in two different tabs, and I hit SEND on the wrong tab, so the last point I was making was completely missing from the email. 😂 I'll finish my thought below. The bright side is, now you know for sure these emails aren't written by AI! Myth #3: "Time alignment = phase coherence"I totally understand the temptation to think this way. We try to manually align capsules of microphones to achieve maximum phase coherence. Why wouldn't we also do that in our DAW? The reason goes back to complex waveforms and correlation, or "sameness" between different signals. A close mic on a snare drum is poorly correlated to a distant room mic. Aligning those two signals in the time domain usually does nothing for their coherence, and it often causes more problems. This is honestly the biggest frustration I have with Auto Align and why I decided to make PhaseLock. The way it works in 4 steps: 1. PhaseLock slices up the audio, creates a distribution of the coherence, and builds a "tree" hierarchy of correlated signals from the main reference, all the way down to every instance in your group. 2. It asks you "do you want to do any time alignment?" And if so, you can choose to align ANY track to ANY other track, unlike Auto Align. Sometimes useful for highly correlated signals, a DI + amp combo, or dialog. 3. It then determines "should polarity be inverted?" or more precisely, "are these signals pretty much inverted right now?" And if so, it inverts automatically. 4. It then asks "what is the optimal arrangement of all pass filters across every track in this group to achieve maximum coherence at the most important frequencies between them?" and applies those automatically. This is the one that gives the "wow" moment. I've been learning and obsessing over the science behind phase relationships for the last year, and I cannot wait to let this work out into the wild. If you read this far, I really appreciate you, Reader. Sorry for the double email this week. Until Wednesday, happy music making! |
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