Plugin Deals and Discussion Thread

guitarfishbay

That sounds interesting.

You know what I just had a thought... these rotating $29 sales - are they just trying to get people to piece together Mercury on their own in a pseudo subscription format?

Current price of Mercury $2999 - number of plugins 150+ (I'm not counting them manually to find out how many over 150 it is).  IIRC it's been about that price for a while.

Simple maths $3000 / 150 = $20

frank1985

Waiting for the kramer master tape to go on sale for something silly

octatonic

frank1985 said:

Waiting for the kramer master tape to go on sale for something silly

I'd give that a miss myself (I own it).
Compared to Slate's VTM or UAD Studer 800 it just doesn't compare imho.
If you want a good, cheap but awesome sounding tape plugin then check out McDSP's Analog Channel.
It has been around for a long time but I still use it all the time.
It is on sale for $49 at the moment.

Cirrus

octatonic said:

It is more subtle than that.

I had a "down the rabbit hole" moment when I started to notice the differences in the channels on Waves' NLS. I think it was channel 4 of the SSL model, had more sub bass than the others and I started thinking hey, I should put my kick on 4... and in the stereo instances I was scrolling through the channels to find a pair that matched because, say, if it defaulted to channel 7 and 8 then 8 was louder and the bus was a bit lopsided.

guitarfishbay

@Cirrus ;

Am I right in remembering you're a Studio One user - do you ever use the Mix Engine FX?  

Cirrus

@guitarfishbay  alas, no - Sonar for me. But Studio One does look cool.

guitarfishbay

Hmm must have confused you with someone else then!

I'm enjoying Studio One.  Looks like Sonar also has ARA which is pretty fantastic when it comes to completing things before I die of old age.

Cirrus

Yes, but I broke Melodyne while trying to tidy up my disparate plugin folders, so now it doesn't work right any more within sonar - I need to play the audio into it in standalone mode, though real time editing is still possible. Must fix that at some point...

ToneControl

the Waves newish grand piano and Electric 88 are very nice

guitarfishbay

Have you tried Vocalign? It can be used via ARA also.

If you do a lot of harmony/overdubs then it's a gigantic time (and vocal stamina) saver. We do so many less takes and less time spent editing since getting it, for ultimately the same end result. Not everything needs aligning as sometimes looseness is nice, but when you do want tighter it's very good.

Revoice is superb too, as it can transfer pitch as well as timing, but for just aligning vocalign via ARA is lightning fast.

Cirrus

Hey, only just saw this! No, never. I tend to stack my own voice for harmonies and as such I'm usually tight enough for my needs. And my wife's in the CBSO Chorus so I like to affect an air of expertise doing this sort of thing in the old school way.  

Anyways, reason I'm here is that Waves API2500 is $29 today - cheapest I've ever seen it. When I get home tonight I'm going to download the demo and see how much I like and/ or need it. Thing is I only got IK's Precision Bus Compressor a few weeks ago. Do I need another? (don't answer that...)

guitarfishbay

Cirrus said:

Hey, only just saw this! No, never. I tend to stack my own voice for harmonies and as such I'm usually tight enough for my needs. And my wife's in the CBSO Chorus so I like to affect an air of expertise doing this sort of thing in the old school way.  

Anyways, reason I'm here is that Waves API2500 is $29 today - cheapest I've ever seen it. When I get home tonight I'm going to download the demo and see how much I like and/ or need it. Thing is I only got IK's Precision Bus Compressor a few weeks ago. Do I need another? (don't answer that...)

I'll tag you next time then @Cirrus ;

I have the API comp - it's nice.  If you like it when you demo it send me a message.

That's really cool.  I do think natural tight sounds awesome but there's a certain aesthetic that's extremely hard to get with regular tracking tightness, especially with lining up plosives and esses.  If you want it to sound like a big extension of the same voice, rather than a choir/chorus then vocalign is really cool.  So with the way I use it - any gang vocal type stuff or stuff that's supposed to sound big, won't use it, too tight can sound smaller.  Stuff that's supposed to be very tight, it honestly takes about 10 seconds to use it via ARA and it'll turn a good take into a perfectly aligned take if you want, there are diffferent algos for how tight you use it

Cirrus

To be honest, it does sound like a cool tool - especially for a voice like mine where extra thickness would be no bad thing - it's a bit more David Byrne/ Wayne Coyne than I'd like to admit. 

guitarfishbay

Cirrus said:

To be honest, it does sound like a cool tool - especially for a voice like mine where extra thickness would be no bad thing - it's a bit more David Byrne/ Wayne Coyne than I'd like to admit. 

I actually never double mains - if you did Revoice would be an awesome way to go.  That can transfer pitch as well as timing, again on a sliding scale (with much more fine control over this than vocalign).  There's a demo of it, it's not cheap, but they do 30% off sales every now and then or you can rent to own via their website I think (works out more expensive, but more flexible).

I almost always double harmonies though, and fairly often have two harmonies doubled, so that's 5 vocals that need to be to a certain level of tightness.  The lower tightness options sound pretty natural but modern, if that makes any sense at all.  And you can pretty much hard align it if you want, but if it wasn't fairly tight to begin with it might not survive it so well...

You can't polish a turd unfortunately, no amount of plugins will save my boring tone.  I thought your voice sounded pretty good on the song you posted a while back

Cirrus

Ahh, waves online installer. Downloading 32 processes in parallel = hardly downloading at all.

duotone

PolarityMan said:

For reference I jsut finished some drum editing and posted up the results so the guys could look for glitches and the drummer said "fantastic thats my best ever performance".

There are 1728 drum edits that I made by hand in that track

  I'm sure it will come out after a few beers!

guitarfishbay

octatonic said:

guitarfishbay said:

I haven't, I assume I should?

What they are doing is really interesting, which is to model the nonlinear characteristics of individual channels in a specific console. When you pull up, say, 40 instances of the G channel plugin they will all have slight, imperceptible differences between them, much like an actual console (if you think about how individual components to a channel change over time).

It is a really novel approach and I believe it works.

Well now I too believe it works.

I picked up Console E in the recent sale, and must say I think it sounds fantastic.  Extra interesting is being able to have a stereo channel be made up of two different channels, or to be able to chose to have them match... that's quite a nice touch.

guitarfishbay

Also there's an upcoming official SSL Brainworx plugin, doesn't seem that much info on it yet but it was seen on a livestream of a mix recently and Dirk confirmed it to be real in the Plugin Alliance Facebook group.

duotone

guitarfishbay said:

Also there's an upcoming official SSL Brainworx plugin, doesn't seem that much info on it yet but it was seen on a livestream of a mix recently and Dirk confirmed it to be real in the Plugin Alliance Facebook group.

Sounds interesting @guitarfishbay is that livestream available to watch on YouTube?

guitarfishbay

duotone said:

guitarfishbay said:

Also there's an upcoming official SSL Brainworx plugin, doesn't seem that much info on it yet but it was seen on a livestream of a mix recently and Dirk confirmed it to be real in the Plugin Alliance Facebook group.

Sounds interesting @guitarfishbay is that livestream available to watch on YouTube?

No - the livestream I saw was the Jens Bogren Live mix of Opeth. It’s for members of Nail The Mix so I can’t share it.

A public beta of the plugin is due on Monday. 

https://www.facebook.com/brainworx/videos/2263590586999523/