4 ways to use Neutron's Phase module in mixing

Phase is a tricky concept to understand. It’s also pivotal to creating good mixes. That’s why Neutron 5 comes with a brand new Phase module. 

This is a tool perfect for fixing issues both common and idiosyncratic in mixing applications. I personally think this module is worth the price of the plug-in itself, and this article will hopefully show you why. 

Let’s dive in now, covering four different scenarios where the Phase module can save your mix.

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1. Preserve headroom in your mix

The Phase module can help you preserve headroom in your mix by fixing asymmetrical waveforms at the track level, doing so without affecting the quality of the sound whatsoever.

If you’re confused by that statement, don’t worry. I’ll explain exactly what I mean, step by step. 

This is arguably the most important thing to learn here, as careful consideration of this issue will allow you to achieve louder mixes with fewer sonic tradeoffs. 

Soundwaves displace air molecules in positive and negative directions

In basic scientific terms, sound always moves through a medium – usually air – doing so in waves. These waves create air pressure in both positive and negative directions. We call the positive movements “compression,” while negative movements are referred to as “rarefaction.”

This concept may sound complex, but you’ve probably seen representations of the phenomenon in your DAW: 

This is a waveform in Logic Pro X. Whether you use Reaper, Pro Tools, or any other DAW, a waveform tends to look like this. This is a visual representation of how sound moves in positive and negative directions. 

Note the centerline that divides this waveform through its middle. Audio that peaks above the centerline is positive. Audio that goes below the centerline, creating a dip or trough, is negative.

The further away the signal moves from the centerline, the louder it will measure on a peak meter. This is true in both positive and negative directions:

A high positive swing will measure loudly. A high negative swing will also measure loudly.

If you understand this, we can move on to the next part.

Loud signals take up headroom in your mix 

Push a signal too far into a piece of hardware and it will distort. The same is true for digital systems: 0 dBFS is our cutoff point, above which you’ll incur distortion.

What about 32-bit floating point processing however? Shouldn’t a floating-point system obviate distortion? 

Well, think of how audio eventually gets to listeners: dithered to 24-bit, or streamed over a lossy codec. Your precious floating-point math will do nothing to cheat distortion once the file has been truncated into a fixed-point file. 

This is exactly why mastering engineers use limiters: the ultimate destination is an analog playback device, one that doesn’t handle audio above 0 dBFS all that well. A brickwall limiter helps protect the playback system from needless distortion. That is its intended use-case, anyway.

Brickwall limiters protect the playback system by responding, by and large, to peak energy. If a limiter detects a sudden spike of signal exceeding its ceiling, it’s going to clamp down to keep that signal from creating distortion.

Now we can really begin to understand the problem at hand:

Real-world soundwaves are not symmetrical

The soundwaves you record don’t usually rest neatly on that centerline. They actually tend to swing more into the positive side of the line than the negative – or vice versa. 

This asymmetricality could be inherent to the sound, as is the case with brass instruments, or it could have something to do with how you recorded the signal. Either way, the signal is asymmetrical. It extends further toward one side than the other. 

Asymmetrical soundwaves will take up needless headroom in your mix

We’ve finally arrived at the crux of the matter: 

Asymmetrical soundwaves extend further toward one side of the centerline than they need to. This means they will measure louder on a peak meter than they actually sound to your ear. 

If you don’t correct this problem, the asymmetrical waveform will eat up headroom before it actually should. It will trigger a compressor to work harder, a clipper to add more distortion, or a limiter to clamp down – even though it isn’t necessarily loud.

The Rotation knob in the Phase module addresses this issue at the track level. All it does is reorient the waveform so that it becomes balanced on the centerline, bringing the peak level down as a consequence.

You can use the Rotation knob by sight, with the provided oscilloscope in the GUI, or you can use the Learn button, which will handle the problem for you: simply play your sound, hit “Learn” and the Phase Module will iron out the asymmetry. 

Your sound, on its own, will not change in terms of its average level. But its peak level should go down, giving you more headroom to work with in the context of your mix.  

Whether you use the learn function in the Phase module or go by ear and meter, this is a fantastic tool for working with synths, brass instruments, basses, guitars, vocals, and many other instruments. You buy yourself extra headroom to make your mix punchy and loud without actually changing the character of the sound. You can either push it farther before it achieves the level of compression it did before, or you can leave it alone, and let the extra headroom add a sense of openness to your mix.  

You ought to be careful with multi-miked sound sources, however, as manipulating the phase rotation of one microphone will change the relationships between all the mics capturing an instrument. 

Even so, careful manipulation of phase rotation can be utilized to your advantage, even for things like multi-miked drum kits. I’ll show you how now.

2. Enhance multi-miked drum recordings

Say you’re working with a multi-miked drum kit, one recorded very badly. Here phase issues can wreak havoc on your mix, creating a washy sound. The Phase module can help you immeasurably in this situation. 

Before we get into the time-aligning side of this module—which relies on sidechain inputs and time-delays—let’s observe what happens if we take a multi-miked drum kit with a flabby kick and adjust the rotation knob by ear and meter.

Watch this short, wordless video, in which I mess around with the phase rotation knob in real time:

Note how the kick grows more solid and centered when I push the phase in a negative direction. This can sometimes be all you need to get one feisty element in a multi-miked recording to sit well. 

The old way of doing things relied on flipping the polarity of an offending track and settling for the best sounding option. This could work – or it could present you with the lesser of two evils. With this phase rotation control, you can go between the all-or-nothing settings 0 or 180 degrees. 

3. Time-align multi-miked drums

Now let’s get into the weeds of fixing bad drum recordings with the Phase module’s automated time-alignment capabilities. 

All those washy, smeary sounds? They’re the result of poor mic technique: sound travels to various microphones set up around the kit, arriving at these microphones at different times. If the mics are set up incorrectly, these differences in time can cause some frequencies to cancel out in volume, while reinforcing others. Ian Stewart covers this all in depth in this article.

For many years, software has been able to ameliorate these issues quickly, deploying automated time-alignment among microphones to iron out the differences. These plug-ins give you the most “technically correct” time alignment between the microphones. However, they often do this at the expense of spatial character and depth.

To paraphrase the great Carl Sagan: a little phase inaccuracy can be a wonderful thing. You just don’t want too much of it.

Neutron’s Phase module can get you that “technically correct” sound, if that’s what you’re going for. It handles time-alignment issues by coordinating its Learn button, Rotation knob, and Delay parameter with a sidechain input. 

Say your overhead mics don’t sound great together—the image is off, and everything is papery. You can sidechain one overhead to the other, hit play, hit Learn, and Neutron will make it sound better. You can totally leave it alone at this point.

But here’s the thing: Neutron makes it really easy to tweak the results, into something satisfying.

Again, there is “technically correct” and then there is “artistically correct.” Artistically correct can only be achieved by a human. Other plug-ins on the market make the “artistically correct” part of the job a pain to accomplish. Neutron gives you a fantastic dual-view oscilloscope and easy to grab controls for making it happen.

Observe the static mix of this drum set.

This is an example of a home-studio recording that has a lot going against it. We’ve got mic placement issues (three mics are spot-miking cymbals, rather than capturing a full kit balance). We’ve got drumkit issues (the kick just doesn’t sound good), and room problems (resonances galore). All of this contributes a washy, smeary sound—and we’re going to clear things up a lot with the Phase module. 

We’re going to use the module as follows: 

With the three overhead mics, we identify which cymbals are the most prevalent and pan them based on where those cymbals are located within the actual kit. Thankfully, there are no phase issues here warranting time-alignment.

We route those overhead mics into an Overhead bus. 

The snare top mic receives the overhead bus in its sidechain, and we phase align the snare to these overheads.

The same goes for the toms, the kick, and the room mic.

The hi-hat mic and the snare bottom mic receive the snare top mic in their sidechain inputs. We time-align the hats and bottom snare mic to the snare. 

Learn is used, but we always tweak by ear.

The whole thing takes under five minutes.

That’s the order of operations, but first, I want to show you how the current industry-standard plug-in for time-aligning drums handled this job:

Now, here’s the Phase module:

Example 2 isn’t bad. It’s what I used before Phase Align came out. It’s also very easy: you load it on every track, hit its own version of the Learn button, play some audio, and away you go.

But notice how all the depth and character is gone. In Example 2, the drums are all right in front of your phase. There’s something unnatural about it.

That’s precisely the issue with the competition – and it’s the wonderful thing about Neutron. Neutron makes everything very easy to tweak after you do any sort of automated learning. This tweaking is incredibly powerful for retaining that all-important sense of character and depth.

4. Use the Learn button to phase-align layered samples

Finally, Neutron Phase allows us to easily align samples, which is fantastic in drum augmentation.

Drums like these still need a little help, even after phase-alignment. They need sample reinforcement, because the kit pieces don’t sound great on their own. So, I’m going to turn to my drum libraries. 

And I immediately run into a problem: a beautiful kick-drum sample might not align with my original kick, creating a weak sound, and defeating the purpose of sample reinforcement. You could flip the polarity of the sample, adjust its pitch, and choose the best option by ear. This could take ages, or it could lead you on a wild goose chase through your sample library. 

Instead, if I sidechain the original drum kit into an instance of Neutron on the sample-drum track, I can align them with the Learn button, and create a phase-locked pairing between the two drum hits. This allows the sample to help the kick while blending into the overall picture. 

Observe our drum kit with sample augmentation on the kick and snare, left unaligned:

The samples feel noticeable and apart from the original hits. 

Now we’ll used the Learn function in Neutron Phase to align the samples to their respective kit pieces:

Now we’re in a good place to start using other modules in Neutron to craft a great drum sound—though of course, that’s beyond the purview of this article.

Try Neutron Phase

Hopefully we’ve shown how well the Phase module can come in handy at the instrument level. I’m now going to do something I rarely do and make a personal endorsement of the product in question:

I go through a lot of plug-ins. I get many for free, and I pay for many others. The paid ones fall by the wayside as often as the free ones; the sheen comes off, or I find something better. When something makes such a huge impression that it becomes a staple in my work, I like to spotlight the product in bold, uncertain terms. I’m doing so now for Neutron’s Phase module: this thing lets me work quicker to achieve better results. Hopefully it will do the same for you.

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