Black Salt Audio - Silencer Plugin - Freaking Incredible!

[@blacksaltaudio]

Thanks Barry! We're glad you're digging Silencer.

[@epidemika5054]

Amazing plugin!

[@pandinusimperator4974]

I get tracks fairly often with really bad bleed. So bad in fact, sometimes it's difficult to tell one track from another. This is going to save me soooo much time. Thank you Barry for posting.

[@SoundKilterStudio]

Good call Barry! The Silencer, as you found, is AWESOME! Of course, and Im sure you know but in case you dont, Black Salt Audio was founded and is owned by Jordan Valeriote. Who is another "KZbinr", and excellent producer/mixer, who I became a huge fan of years ago, well before BSA was established, when first starting out. I found him pretty quick because he primarily works in hard rock/metal as I do. And I learned a TON from him as I do you sir. I really only follow 3 "youtube" producers/mixers. And you guys are 2/3 of them. Excellent video sir!

[@samphelps856]

Third?

[@bigheartsmolpen]

Yes. Who is the third one? India wants to know.

[@SoundKilterStudio]

Sorry all. I just saw your comments. But it is David Gnozzi, MixbusTV.

[@gandthefewrecords]

Love mixbusTV

[@eweesplace]

Same here. Huge fan of his. Another guy to check out that has a very similar approach in many ways is Frightbox Recording on YT

[@The_paradox_of_Youth]

Brought a smile to my face to once again see you in my feed sir. 👊🏽

[@brandonroskom5890]

lovin it, just picked it up, i was happy to see you reviewing this product when i searched for a review, a pleasant surprise! thank you Barry!

[@LondonSteveLee]

Bought this as soon as it came out - its's fantastic.

[@SteveWilliams-5150]

Wow. That plugin is amazing Barry 😮 I’m getting it. Thanks for the tip buddy!

[@Arden7one]

12:33 "well, you gotta put a lipstick on a pig" 😂 I absolutely love it, and agree - thank you for the review Barry. I've heard of BSA's Silencer first of Rhyse from Spinlight Studio, and am grateful to get the confirmation from another reputable source 🙏 much appreciated.

[@Mitsch76]

Yes I agree it is a very useful tool. But in fact they could have named it "simple drums gate" as well. I guess it helps by doing all adjustments for specific drums, instead of yourself having to set all the gates by yourself. So its a big timesaver and the results are quite good to my ears. (Accept the snare because of some ghost notes and beeing very dynamically played). Great video, Barry! THX for sharing this plugin!

[@BarryJohns]

I e since learned more about the plugin, you can easily adjust the snare gate to perform as expected. I was choosing presets only, which can work very differently depending on the recording.

[@eweesplace]

Jordan is a great guy and I'm really happy to see BSA getting some good attention.

[@privateer2584]

Thanks for this. I have a recording I'm working on right now that has a lot of bleed. I'm gonna have to try this out.

[@markholley]

Nice job, I’ve been going through and using strip silence, it just cutting out space between times for instance. I’ll give this a try!

[@JAMPROSOUND]

Silencer is a must have, dessert island tool.

[@jimhoman4415]

I'd check out Sonnox Drum Gate for something similar but with a frequency tunable bleed control and leveling control. It's a little more expensive but works when The Silencer doesn't.

[@ronson795]

I´ve bought it but I never use it till they fix the problem with cutting the transient at the very beginning. The channel Bad Hair Detective showed it and measured it. You loose information of the signal and punch which is a no go. Sonnox does it right. Hopefully they will fix this at some point. Then it's indeed the tool for such scenarios.

[@BeatsAndMeats]

I like to decrease the amount of work that Silencer has to do, especially on kick… because my kick mics are pointed right at my snare drum. So this is the chain I’ve been using and it gives perfect results. Saturn->Silencer->Drum Leveler But Silencer is doing all the heavy lifting and I could recommend it more highly.

[@echothenatives]

Oh I bought it! your video is confirmation! Thanks man!

[@defmike617]

The clipper and the saturation is great from them.

[@kenkrugger]

Thank you so much for this. I’m mixing drums right now and I’m pulling my hair out because of bleed!

[@somberwindsofficial8771]

Liked also the "Ring preserver" preset for Snare. With some of the other presets the snare went completely silent occasionally on non-triggered blast beats recorded with SM57.

[@donnythompson9233]

I would have been more impressed if the bleed on the snare mic could have been attenuated WITHOUT wiping out all the ghost notes/stick drags on the snare….it totally killed the feel.

[@jimhoman4415]

That's what the ghost button is for.

[@briansrensen8204]

Nice, but it's essentially a(nother) gate plugin and it leaves you with the same issues. Kick a toms are typically easy to gate without sonic loss. Snare however is always a compromise between the full snare sound including a ton of hihat, cymbal and kick bleed or a choked sound with no ghost notes and natural sustain. The fact that snares need compression makes it even harder. I don't see how this plugin brings us closer to a solution.

[@marnofranck6204]

Please try out Oxford Drum Gate. Which of the two would work most of the time?

[@jimhoman4415]

The Oxford Drum Gate is great. More tweakable and more features.

[@Cadet44642]

This sounds amazing. I have great mic and placement but we are in a drum cage and it is a noises box!!!! I get horrible bleed on our toms making the overheads unusable. I wonder how it would do on vocals?

[@jaymusik1235]

Amazing

[@frankfunke8689]

Barry, I’m a OLD drummer trying to do drum videos of songs I like. I have little audio mixing skills. Can you recommend some basic book or type of class that I could attend? I’m going to try this plug in and see if this will improve the overall sound. Just an FYI I’m using moises, Logic Pro & Final Cut. Any info is greatly appreciated

[@dwaynearthur1476]

LOOKING gooood!!! wILL GIVE IT A TRY !

[@musiccreation1198]

Looking hip Barry ! ;)

[@dnashofficial]

great plugin. i'm definitely going to try it on my drums. thanks for the heads up! on a side note, do you think this would work on that lead vocal track? 100% wet? on delta?

[@snapascrew]

Nice. What do you think of the Sonnox oxford drum gate?

[@miserablesod1]

Seems efficient enough, but totally changed the feel of the snare by eliminating the ghost notes...

[@jimhoman4415]

Clicking the ghost button would help that a lot. IT works pretty well.

[@miserablesod1]

@@jimhoman4415 maybe, but this guy’s not doing that…

[@willieelliott352]

Thanks Barry, I was trying to take your advice and not buy anymore gear, but I got to have that 1, and was going to ask you if you prefer to have a hardware compressor in your vocal chain or a plugin, I'm thinking of adding a hardware peace.

[@jayfortunato9584]

Hi Barry, I use Sonible Smart Gate which also does an amazing job and I believe uses AI. It's pricier than the Silencer but may be more versatile but that's just a guess.

[@Fastvoice]

It's indeed AI based.

[@harleyestrada6476]

Does this work the other way around? Will it take snare and kick out of Over Heads?

[@facelessproduction7059]

Sorry to spoil the magic but it's only a Gate/Expander! Sorry if I spoil the hype? The included presets are only different time settings on attack and release with sidechain to focus on specific frequency. It have already exist for a long time in example Cubase/Nuendo and other DAWs. Perhaps its new thing for people on Pro Tools? LOL. =) I can se its value though, be helpful for those that don't have the technical skills how to setup Gate and Expanders correctly to fix bleeding drums.

[@BarryJohns]

Well if ya watched the video you’d know that I said as such. There is more to this plugin, lots of things I’ve experienced since shooting that video.

[@randylahey2953]

Nice

[@Jade-lb8rr]

Will you please do a review on Wes Audio ngbus compressor :)

[@damienribot1143]

Probably a multiband gate. Good job, but you can configure yours, with Blue Cat Audio Patchwork or MB-7.

[@IMJUSTWANTTOTALK]

Hey Barry how you doing with nuendo, cubase lately? I see lastly un pro tools again why? Did you came back? Btw I'm a happy cubase user

[@BarryJohns]

I spend more time in Nuendo than anything. When recording this video as an example, the main outs of PT was fed to Studio One, where I also recorded a the music coming from PT.

[@thomasfokas]

I’m going to imagine they’re using multiband tech, but on a gate circuit rather than a dynamic multi-band compressor

[@cfs]

I don't have the same use case - live drums - but, as a gate, I prefer StandardGate by SIR Tools. It also has debleed and lots more options. Think it cost me under $20 on sale and it became my favorite gate such that I just deleted all my others. I'll have to compare. Not as simple of an interface.

[@dillontaylor8035]

It’s great!

[@jahstafari4606]

Hmm what mixer or workstationor how can i call it 😅is that beaty on your worktable plz?

[@michaelbonanno7476]

I must be from another planet because I love to hear bleed …. because when the drums are panned, the bleed fills out the rest of the sides. Yes I know that “‘modern music” likes to have everything isolated. But let me ask you something. When you hear a live band, do you hear everything separated like what this plugin does? I get that you want control over every aspect. When people say they’d rather hear a live band than an mp3, my guess is that they like the “‘bleed”, right? Just putting it out there :)

[@bobchris11]

I think it depends on the quality of the recording. With good mic selection/placement yes bleed is good. If the recording process is sloppy i use silencer to separate then use reverb to create cohesion.

[@rockboy360]

The overheads and room mics glue the gated close mics. You don't want the tom mics muddying up your mix ringing and humming while they're not being played. It also depends on your room, tuning, dampening and mic placement. Bleed can be nice when your close mics are SDCs because their polar pattern is more open and their off axis top end is smoother. But you can't get away with undampened, dark shells, bright cymbals and SM 57s for example.

[@69RJK]

Bob Clearmountain talks about it. Bleed phobia is overrated. He played Springsteens vocal for born in the USA, where he plays guitar in the booth while singing. Didn’t seem to hurt 😊

[@rockboy360]

​@@69RJKit is song and genre dependent. An SM57s off axis response to cymbals is harsh and nasty. If your snare is too dark, you'll have to boost a lot of top end which will exaggerate the nasty bleed, sometimes even with a gate. Compression can make it even worse. This is the reason why a lot of people end up using samples, specially in rock and metal contexts. Bleed is good when it's manageable and doesn't hurt, which is rarely the case. Pro recording engineers know how to get the perfect single to noise ratio and capture the least problematic bleed but most of us deal with shitty recordings from home studios, and we get to mix sessions we haven't even tracked so a tool like Silencer is the only way to mantain real drums, that's actually a real drum saver.

[@fredfox3851]

Michael, like you I think there can be benefit from a certain amount of drum bleed. FYI, the silencer does let you change the threshold and sustain to your liking beyond just the presets presented here. Being a drummer, I hate the sound of tom gates but found this plug tolerable. I think of it mostly as a cymbal debleeder but it does sort of dull the treble of the kit down. That meant my overheads and room mics levels changed. There is a free trial, but for $50.00 it was not much of a risk.

[@HR2635]

hmm.. not bad.. but does not seem better than several other gates I use? Do you guys know DeBleeder?.. not as fancy looking, but just as effective if not better. Mostly using my reaper stock gate (ReaGate) though which is awesome. DeBleeder is for hard cases (poor recordings). But will get the demo and test. Update: tested trial version.. nope sorry. Even my free DD gate (from the sadly discontinued Dead Duck plugins)is better. a lot in fact: preserves the attack, no muffling of the initial treble in the attack, more natural sound. On BD Silencer is quite good though.. not on snare.

[@imNiceLikeRice]

Yea, sounds pretty smooth with some little artifacts. I think it uses Ai neural networks.

[@redmase1]

Great vid

[@oleromer9525]

Yeah - breathing 😉

[@dyonissiszoes3747]

It’s a gate plugin 😅. Am I missing anything ? Is it revolutionary or something ? I don’t see why this should be so impressive…

[@Azfurita]

Laaaateeeeee

[@HandWiredAmps]

NO NO NO, I do not need another plugin. Hmm, $49 isn't too bad. aaaahhhhhhh!

[@brownhooque]

Is the drummer playing the same song as the rest of the band?

[@BarryJohns]

Really?

[@J3unG]

Watching it now... It's just a gate. whoopee...

[@BarryJohns]

Well, it has a lot more under the hood than that.

[@rockboy360]

It's a gate/expander that lowpasses the hit right after the transient, allowing it to still cut through and boost high end without exaggerating the bleed.

[@thomasfokas]

What is going on with the drum playing? Jesus

[@joboiecruiser]

I like normal bleed, I don't use plugins, I don't like gates, and I don't like this product. KZbin Joe Logsdon & Company

[@bobchris11]

@alanmartinez1025😂

[@PhatNutz]

i don't even need this and think it's cool. 😁