Three minute reads for audio engineers and music makers
By Thomas Dulin

Hey Reader, here's this week's Take Three email.

Today is October 1, which means that all the beta versions of PhaseLock will no longer run.

​If you want to continue using it, there's still time to get the intro price with code LAUNCH at the jelly site here.​

TAKE ONE: QUICK LINKS

• ​Waves Tracks Live 2.0 is out. I used v1 a few years ago and eventually switched to Harrison LiveTrax which remains lower-priced
• ​Which M6 or M5 Mac is right for audio pros? (I'm rocking an M4 Mac Mini and loving it, personally)
• ​Feds Want Nearly 4 Years in Prison for AI Music Fraudster Who ‘Stole Millions’ This guy's bots had 9x as many streams as Taylor Swift last year. The US say they want a harsh sentence to "send a message."

TAKE TWO: RECENT RELEASES

Yesterday, Jelly Audio released v1.0.2 of PhaseLock which includes a text export feature. If you want to use PhaseLock in live audio but haven't wanted to insert it across all your channels, this is a great way to see everything the plugin is doing and apply it yourself.

​Here's a quick demo on Instagram.​

TAKE THREE: THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS "IN PHASE"

You'll often hear an engineer flipping polarity on a channel strip and saying something like "ah, yeah, this was out of phase."

That can be a helpful shorthand phrase, but you should know that phase isn't binary. It's on a spectrum (literally, if you'll pardon the pun 😂).

What I mean is that it's both frequency-specific and it ranges from fully destructive at a given frequency and fully constructive.

As an example, take a look at this coherence graph. This is a real screenshot from an instance of PhaseLock comparing a "kick in" mic to a "kick out" mic. The red line is the raw (pre-PhaseLock) coherence across all frequencies. Green is corrected.

The Y axis goes from -1 (complete cancellation) to +1 (perfect summing). The X axis goes from 20Hz to 20kHz.
​
You'll notice that at about 40Hz, there was complete cancellation here. But 100Hz had almost perfect summing. Flipping polarity would have given us summation at 40 and cancellation at 100, the opposite problem.

In this case, PhaseLock applied an all pass filter at 35Hz to improve the sub coherence, as well as an all pass filter around 800Hz to repair some of the cancellation around the midrange.

So: was this "in phase" or "out of phase?" As you can see, the answer is often more complex than that.

It may have been more accurate in this specific case to say something like "these two mics had destructive coherence in the sub range," or even "the kick mics were out of phase around 40Hz."

Of course, if you have two sources that are extremely incoherent, such as two room mics placed close together but on opposite axes, I would totally say something like "those room mics are out of phase."

So next time you're thinking about the relationship between two sources, remember that there's (usually) no binary right or wrong answer.

​And honestly if you don't want to have to think about it, that's exactly what PhaseLock is for...​

I know this was nerdy - I hope it was helpful to at least one of you out there!

Do you like the nitty gritty articles like this or do you prefer a bit lighter reading in this newsletter? Hit reply and let me know!

Until next week, happy music making, Reader.

Thomas Dulin Producer / Engineer / Mixer jelly.audio