ShaperBox: Fancy techniques to create audibility.

In the last Fiver Friday I gave a heads up to some techniques for using Shaperbox. These can be used to manipulate instrumentals or musicbeds to increase audibility. These 1min videos are easy and fast to understand. I tested three of them for radio imaging benefits.

1. Remove Hi Hats with VolumeShaper.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLeP-H9iSG0

I did this with an instrumental in the way described above, using a straight house loop.
This one’s really works if you want to add or decrease power of instrumentals, loops or musicbeds. For example you want that certain part after the drop, but the whole mix sounds too full when adding even more elements. You can increase audibility by using this technique by removing elements. This means you don’t have to crank up limiters, keeping similar overall volume, but delivering nice, understandable audio.

Important: you need to set up the proper bpm.

2. Add Width with WidthShaper

Let’s say you like the overall tone of a specific riser, but its mono. This means it corrupts with your vocals, as they are both mono, sitting in the center. Using this technique gives you the possibility to widen up either the music, sound effects or vocals to create space for each element.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QaATytaj7k

In this case I added width to the downshifter.

3. Isolating Kick drum with FilterShaper.

This one is also great to create lighter versions of instrumentals and works similar to the effect described in 1. .
You can bring the original version back in by using the mix knob. So this one works to create transitions, blending the original back in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wOeKJO3I1c

An easier way to do this would be using a usual low pass sweeping up. Using FilterShaper gives you more control at the one hand, as you can set up the filter curve more precisely, but takes more time to do it at the other hand.

The result is nice for my ears. There’s not much loss in quality. Nice one!