SOUND ON SOUND THE WORLD’S BEST RECORDING TECHNOLOGY MAGAZINE
THE WORLD’S BEST RECORDING TECHNOLOGY MAGAZINE
1985 — 2024 TM
MUSIC PRODUCTION TECHNIQUES / INDEPENDENT IN-DEPTH PRODUCT TESTS / ENGINEER & PRODUCER INTERVIEWS / LIVE SOUND
TASCAM MODEL 2400 Mixer, recorder, interface and more
DECEMBER 2024
www.soundonsound.com
2024’s best studio kit
Kii Seven VOLUME 40 • ISSUE 2
“An experience genuinely unlike any other!”
‘A Bar Song’ How Shaboozey’s mega-hit was made
WIN
AUDIX MICS
WORTH £ 1 170 www.soundonsound.com
ON TEST: WES AUDIO / IK / LUNATIC AUDIO / NI / FIEDLER AUDIO / SENNHEISER / ACS / GEFELL / DW / SOYUZ / ARTURIA / PRESONUS
TECHNIQUE: MIXING MUSICALLY / STEM SPLITTING IN LOGIC
December 2024 £6.99
78 INSIDE TRACK
IN THIS ISSUE
www.soundonsound.com
December 2024 / issue 2 / volume 40
WIN
FEATURES 34 Musical Mixing:
The Art & The Science
All mix engineers need technical skills — but what’s most important is our ability to bring out the emotion in the music.
42 How I Got That Sound Garth Richardson on the quest to find the perfect bass sound for Mudvayne’s ‘Dig’.
64 Gear Of The Year
AUDIX
MICS WORTH £1170
The SOS team pick their favourite hardware and software from the last 12 months.
PAGE 84
78 Inside Track:
Sean Cook & Nevin Sastry
The biggest hit of the decade so far took Shaboozey and his team half an hour to write — and weeks to perfect.
100 Talkback Producer and engineer Gili Portal tells us why she tries to break the rules every day.
122 Spotlight:
Desktop Monitor Controllers
In the age of mixerless studios, monitor controllers are on the rise!
136 Q&A Your studio and recording questions answered.
110 Modular
138 Why I Love... Effects Pedals
Sebsongs main man Sebastian Hastrup talks modules and the importance of the DIY scene in Eurorack.
Paul White explains why, in an age of plug-in plenty, he still loves his stompboxes.
30 PWM MANTIS
126 10 Phantom Rooms
Low End Toys Sample Library
109
52 127
Arturia KeyLab MkIII
102
Boss IR-2
8
Boredbrain Xcelon
86
DPW Design P1 Pedal I/O
119
Dreamtonics Vocoflex Voice Transformer Plug-in
72 Drum Workshop DW
127
126 Native Instruments Alicia’s
Electric Keys Sample Library
Virtual Drum Instrument
Console & gravitas MDS Dolby Atmos Mastering Software & Processor
MNTRA Pyramids
Soyuz 013 Ambisonic Ambisonic Microphone
60
Tascam Model 2400 24-Track Recording Console
20
Toontrack Alchemy Of Pop EZX EZdrummer 3/Superior Drummer 3 Expansion
22
Warm Audio Pedal76 Compressor Pedal
120
Waves Curves Equator Resonance Suppressor Plug-in
94
Wes Audio ngTube EQ Dual-channel Equaliser
Sample Library
Soundworks 48 Fiedler Audio Mastering
24
ModeAudio Airspace Reverb Plug-in
Eurorack Module
12
Microtech Gefell Generation 4
Sennheiser MD 421 Kompakt Dynamic Microphone
Lunatic Audio Rocket Fuel
Modular Microphone System
Eurorack Module
109
Kii Seven
Creative Effects Plug-in
Amp & Cab Emulation Pedal
108
JMC Cyberdrive
Active Monitors
Controller Keyboard
118
16
Audio Cable System
Distortion & Effects Plug-in
PWM Mantis Analogue/Digital Synthesizer
Audio Puck
In-ear Monitors
38
30
In Session Audio Deep Pool
56 Interspace Industries
121
PreSonus Studio One 7 DAW Software
Sample Library
ADDAC System ADDAC310 ACS Custom Emotion Dynamic
112
Mixing & Mastering Plug-ins
Eurorack Module
44
IK Multimedia T-RackS 6
C O V E R
ON TEST
90
Native Instruments Kontakt 8 Software Sampler
119
Neural DSP Parallax X Bass Processing Plug-in
WORKSHOPS 128 130 132 134
Live Pro Tools Cubase Logic
ON TE ST
Soyuz 013 Ambisonic Ambisonic Microphone
Will Soyuz’s beautifully crafted four-capsule mic help turn Ambisonics from a niche interest to a mainstream studio technology?
playback. In practice, this is typically manufactured by panning mono and stereo sources around a speaker array. Ambisonics, by contrast, is a spatial recording format, and an Ambisonic microphone is designed to capture the 3D soundfield that impinges on it.
The Age Of Ambisonics SAM INGLIS
T
he brainchild of pioneering mathematicians Michael Gerzon and Peter Craven, Ambisonics extends the idea of Mid-Sides stereo into three dimensions. And given how much popular confusion there is about Mid-Sides stereo, it’s hardly surprising that Ambisonics is widely misunderstood. In particular, I think many people view it as something that’s only relevant if you’re working in surround — but nothing could be further from the truth. An Ambisonic signal simply describes the 3D soundfield at a particular point in space, and the beauty of it is that this soundfield can be mapped onto any playback system you like, from a mono speaker to a vast Atmos array. Formats such as Dolby Atmos are ‘spatial’ in the sense that they generate a three-dimensional soundscape on
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In conjunction with Ken Farrer at Calrec, Gerzon and Craven created the first commercial Ambisonic mic, the Soundfield, back in the late ’70s. Now part of the Rode group, Soundfield still make high-end Ambisonic mics such as the ST450 MkII and SPS200, and were instrumental in the design of the impressive Rode NT-SF1 back in 2018. All Soundfield mics are first-order Ambisonic mics, which employ four cardioid or subcardioid capsules in a tetrahedral array. The same is true of models such as the Sennheiser Ambeo, Brahma Studio 4 and Core Sound Tetramic, and you can now buy second-order Ambisonic mics with eight capsules such as the Voyage Audio Spatial Mic, Core Sound Octomic and Brahma Studio 8. In principle, a second-order mic offers sharper localisation and thus the potential for greater realism, at the expense of greater complexity and cost.
Before anything useful can be done with the raw sound from the capsules of any Ambisonic mic, it must be processed. In the analogue domain, closely matched gain settings are used to preamplify each capsule’s output by exactly the same amount. Filters are then used to matrix the raw four- or eight-channel signal into a universal pattern known as the B-format. It’s this B-format signal that can be thought of as the 3D extension of Mid-Sides, and which can then be decoded into mono, stereo, or any surround format. If you’re working in stereo, this decoding can mimic any coincident stereo miking array, pointing in any direction you like. In other words, an Ambisonic mic can be thought of a stereo mic that can be reoriented after the fact. (It can do a whole lot else, too.) These days, the filtering and decoding is typically handled digitally, and for good reason. Since the Ambisonic mic is by definition a coincident array, directional information is represented purely as amplitude differences between the channels, and a high degree of precision and consistency is important in order to maintain the integrity of this information. This is much easier to achieve in the digital domain, albeit that no plug-in is quite as impressive to look at as the
analogue decoder box from a Soundfield MkIII! Whereas some of the Soundfield models still come with a custom-made preamp and transcoder, most other Ambisonic mics supply only the means to capture the signal from each capsule directly. It’s up to the user to provide four or eight matched preamp channels and A-D conversion, whereupon digital processing is used to extract the B-format magic from the raw (A-format) signal. As a consequence, mics like the NT-SF1, Ambeo, Tetramic and Studio 4 are more affordable to buy than the high-end Soundfield models.
Purity Test It’s probably fair to say that all the Ambisonic mics that have existed up to now have been marketed primarily as tools for capturing sound in an uncoloured, natural, lifelike fashion. They’re not conceived as ‘character’ mics in the way that, say, a valve mic or a large-diaphragm capacitor mic might be, and they’re not designed to add their own contribution to what we hear. An Ambisonic mic is typically intended to provide a completely transparent — and uniquely versatile — window on the audio world. That’s not quite so true of the latest first-order Ambisonic mic to reach the market. Like most such designs, Soyuz’s 013 Ambisonic employs four directional capsules in a tetrahedral array. But unlike any other current Ambisonic mic, it has a transformer-balanced output stage for each capsule, employing Soyuz’s custom toroidal transformers to add “additional depth with a subtle character that complements any source”. And, whereas many Ambisonic mics use miniature electret capsules, especially at the affordable end of the scale, the 013 Ambisonic features Soyuz’s own, externally polarised (‘true capacitor’) 013 capsules. At 24mm across, these are somewhat larger than those used in many pencil mics, or indeed in other Ambisonic models. Consequently, it’s rather more costly than the NT-SF1 and its rivals, but is still more affordable than the flagship Soundfield variants. The 013 Ambisonic’s unique positioning as a vibey alternative to traditional Ambisonic mics is evident from its packaging. Whereas the Soundfield ST450 MkII and its accessories ship in a bulletproof but unglamorous Peli-type hard plastic case, the 013 comes in
a gorgeous wooden box. The mic itself is also very nicely made, and again, its luxuriant curves contrast with the more utilitarian style of mics like the ST450. Whereas the entire capsule assembly on the ST450 is housed within a protective cage, the 013 follows the design of the NT-SF1 in giving each capsule its own grille and so on. The capsules can actually be unscrewed from the ball-like hub that holds them in place, though I can’t imagine there’s much mileage in a ‘modular’ Ambisonic mic with swappable capsules! The mic as a whole is a couple of inches longer than the ST450, and although it’s only fractionally wider, the spacing between the four capsules is quite a bit bigger. A good-quality shockmount is included, as is a basic standmount, both of which are held in place by a ring that screws onto the base of the mic. One popular application for Ambisonic mics is ambience recording, but if you plan to use one outdoors, you’ll need a good purpose-built windscreen. Nothing is included with the 013, and Soyuz themselves don’t yet offer any optional add-ons, but they say that compatible offerings are available from third parties. At 579g, the 013 is almost exactly twice
Soyuz 013 Ambisonic £2750 pros • Beautifully made. • An interesting alternative to clinical-sounding Ambisonic mics, with a colourful character and presence. • Can accept very high sound pressure levels. • Good-quality shockmount and case.
cons • Transcoding plug-in only available to registered owners of the mic. • No windshield included.
summary Soyuz have made an interesting and ambitious attempt to create a characterful Ambisonic mic that is particularly suited for music recording in the studio.
as heavy as the Soundfield ST450, which could be an issue for use on a boom. Like most other current Ambisonic mics, the 013 doesn’t include a hardware preamp or decoder. Instead, it presents four conventional mono outputs, which need to be fed into four phantom-powered preamp channels with closely matched gain settings. Supplied with the mic are a multicore cable with
Shockmount, standmount and cable are included, but there’s no wind protection as standard.
www.soundonsound.com / December 2024
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ON TE ST
PWM Mantis
Analogue/Digital Synthesizer
PWM’s sophomore outing is an intriguing combination of old and new. WILLIAM STOKES
I
must say, I am a fan of how Paul Whittington’s still-nascent company PWM seems thus far to be characterised by the decision to celebrate, collaborate and co-create. Their output to date comprises two instruments that aim to push things forward while clearly endeavouring to preserve some classic design philosophies. In the case of PWM’s debut, the Malevolent, this involved collaborating with Bristol’s most excellent Future Sound Systems, and if I remember correctly the term ‘Korg MS-20’ was thrown about liberally as a key inspiration. In the case of the sophomore Mantis, it’s the late, great Chris Huggett on the ticket, the man responsible for icons like the Wasp and the OSCar, with a number of very intriguing design features to boot. A little history to help explain the Mantis: before Huggett’s tragic passing in 2020, he and Paul Whittington had worked together, namely designing numerous instruments for Novation such as the MiniNova, Bass Station II and Peak. The Mantis, which would be Huggett’s last synth project, incorporates the oscillator design of the Wasp and unites it with the filter design of the OSCar, doubling both into a fully duophonic instrument. It draws from the worlds of digital and analogue, as well as from the East and West Coast schools, to create something that’s at once a little bit classic, quite unique and phenomenally versatile. A good microcosm of this is its envelope design. These are based around a conventional East Coast design with attack, decay, sustain and release, but as well as adding an extra ‘sustain fall’ stage, they can be set to cycle, like a Buchla-esque function generator. Envelope 1 is normalled to the main VCA, though both are assignable to up to six modulation destinations. More on that later.
Player Ready In my review of the Malevolent back in 2022, I took umbrage with its mini keyboard. Side note: unless they are truly miniature, á la the OP-1, I think mini keyboards are, generally speaking, a waste of time. More often than not
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they simply add expense and take up space, all while those who do need keys are likely to connect a bigger and more playable keyboard anyway. The Mantis, thankfully, has 37 lovely full-size, semi-weighted keys (that’s three octaves), and a pleasant-feeling keybed. Velocity, aftertouch, it’s all here. Wonderful. Similar to the Malevolent, the Mantis’ side panels snap on and off magnetically; something I’m still waiting to see a good reason for but which I hope means we’ll see some nice accessories in due course. Considering the weight of the Mantis, these can detach at any moment when picking the thing up, which is a bit of a hazard. So be sure to lift from the bottom. On the subject of those mysterious side panels, this is also as good a moment as any to point out that at the time of writing PWM have not published a full manual for the Mantis, nor have they still for the Malevolent. Much as I love the precocious appetite for moving onto new designs, I do — ahem — look forward to seeing both of those soon. These are powerful and intricate instruments after all, and aside from the user experience, Whittington and team deserve to show off their work right down to the last Shift function. As of now, I’d imagine there are many complaining about there being too much guesswork, and I can’t but sympathise. Suffice to say, it feels like this issue is somewhat endemic to the industry in 2024: with websites revisable at any time and firmware updates available instantly, far too many units seem to be hitting shelves before all ducks are in a row, to the point that it’s almost as if many of them are still in beta.
The Mantis’ hardware, however, is very much ready, with substantial build quality that I’ll say is becoming of its price. As I’ve mentioned, it is a weighty synth — around five kilos — with a matte‑black metal and plastic enclosure, firm rubberised buttons and sturdy knobs. These do wobble a little in use, I should point out, but not to a hugely concerning degree. They also behave rather like encoders, in that when turning a knob quickly there’s an ever-so-slight lag perceivable between its physical movement and that of its parameter. Joyfully, there’s no screen to speak of, and little more than one layer of panel functionality. Tick. Considering how much is here, that’s quite an achievement. Alongside a robust pair of synth voices, with a sub‑oscillator to boot, there’s an onboard ring modulator, a noise generator with adjustable density, a host of expression and modulation options centred around two LFOs, and an arpeggiator with adjustable bpm and tap tempo, clock division, swing, direction and octave range. The filter section boasts an impressive eight filter modes along
PWM Mantis £1289 pros • Great WYSIWYG panel design. • Replete with ‘bonus’ features. • Excellent‑sounding signal path combining digital and analogue.
cons • Purpose of the side panels is still mysterious... • Tantalisingly close to full four-voice polyphony, which can feel frustrating.
summary The Mantis has its idiosyncrasies but is without doubt a lovingly designed, highly powerful and brilliant-sounding synth.
steps if you accidentally overwrite something. A lot of thought has gone into the design of the Mantis, and it shows.
Singing Voices The Mantis’ musical architecture begins with its two DCOs, both offering sine, triangle, sawtooth and square waves — which all sound quite excellent and leave little to be desired. There are also two other, more curious options. The first of these is symbolised on the panel as a trio of organ pipes, and really does sound like a church organ, spreading what sound like subtly squared-off sine waves spread across an octave or two. This spread is psychoacoustically rather interesting; ascend a scale on the keyboard and it’ll feel like you’ve arrived where you started, not unlike a Shepard tone. Of course, add some modulation and filtering into the mix and not only are lush, Hammond-esque sounds readily available, this sound can be squashed and twisted in numerous different ways to make it, well, not organ-like at all. The second ‘extra wave’ option is labelled WT, and this takes the form of a fairly simple wavetable moving through seven or so
“A synth with buckets of character, it requires a particular approach and certainly rewards the time invested.”
At the back of the Mantis we find a power switch, USB‑C port, MIDI in, out and thru sockets, and a selection of quarter-inch jack sockets for pedals, audio output and headphones.
with adjustable pre-filter drive, and to cap it all off there are two digital bus effects on offer: reverb and mode-adjustable chorus, which can be saved as part of a preset. On the subject of presets, the Mantis has a capacious 200 slots, and these are all instantly accessible, menu-free, via two elegant columns of buttons laid out as two banks of 10 groups, each storing 10 patches. Simply hit bank A or B (the former containing factory presets that can be protected or overwritten as desired), hit a ‘10’ button and then a number. Done. Saving is equally quick and intuitive, and there’s even a handy Undo function for retracing one’s steps if needed — including save
www.soundonsound.com / December 2024
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ON TE ST
ARTURIA KEYL AB MKIII
want this. When I load up a synthesizer like the Mini V or the Jun-6 V, I want to control the filter, but I can’t because those first two knobs are mapped to Brightness and Timbre. Those two macros might well be controlling the filter, but they tend to be scaled and are often actually mapped to something else or a combination of things. In the right context, the macro might be perfect, but more often than not I just want the filter cutoff and resonance on those two first knobs, with the full range of movement and nothing else — please. I could remap them, which sounds sensible, but I ran into a problem where the filter behaved strangely if I mapped it to the first two encoders. Any other controls map without any issues. So there’s something odd at play. It’s probably just a bug that Arturia haven’t noticed, because why would anyone not want to use the beautifully curated mappings that they’ve given us?
In every instance a Mixer option throws level and panning control on the faders and encoders. All the transport controls work properly, and it feels like a solid, regular, basic DAW controller. It’s when you activate ‘Plug‑in’ mode (also known as Device mode in some DAWs) that things start to get interesting. All the Devices in Live and Bitwig, whether instruments or effects, and all the included plug-ins in FL Studio, were automatically mapped and ready to go. It’s all there, with no fuss, labelled correctly on the screen. It’s a remarkably slick and seamless instrument-controlling
that you can’t map anything while in DAW mode, and this is the same for all the DAWs I’ve tried. The Plug‑in or Device mode that gives excellent control over in-built plug-ins doesn’t offer any sort of MIDI control over anything else. It’s really counter‑intuitive when you’re controlling an FL Studio plug-in or a Bitwig Device to have to switch out to a completely different mode to control an Arturia or third-party instrument. And then the control over Arturia instruments was surprisingly inconsistent. I found that you could load up one Arturia synth and it would work fine; you could move from track to track, switch to Arturia mode and the GUI would come up with everything perfectly mapped for control. If you loaded up the same instrument on another track, say multiple Analog Labs, they would all work flawlessly. However, if you loaded up a different Arturia instrument the KeyLab would get hung up on the first one and not reflect the move to another synth on the display. It’s like the display had crashed. I tried this out on multiple DAWs, different computers and even phoned a couple of friends, and they all reported similar outcomes. You can absolutely see what Arturia are aiming for, and when it works, it’s superb, but it’s just not coming off reliably enough, which makes it difficult to fully trust and you end up using a User mode to map controls the old-fashioned way. Hopefully, these things will get ironed
“The Keylab MkIII feels like a beautifully made MIDI controller with a premium keyboard and some really useful features.”
DAW Control Scripted DAW Control was introduced with the KE MkIII and did a good job of offering more in-depth and specific control over the familiar Mackie/ HUI control you get with most MIDI controllers. The KeyLab MkIII supports the same list of DAWs, including Logic Pro, Cubase, Ableton Live, Bitwig Studio and FL Studio. For this review, I knocked around in those last three.
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experience. One of my criticisms of the KeyLab Essential was that you couldn’t skip to the next Device in a chain, but now you can by simply holding a button and turning the encoder. This is how to do DAW control. In Bitwig and Ableton Live the 4x3 pads become clip launchers, in full colour, and have a genuine ability to useful in their limited view and range. In FL Studio they come into play as steps and pattern selectors for the step sequencer, which is a nice touch. Otherwise they are decent as drum pads with a good feel and velocity sensitivity. However, it’s not all plain sailing. One thing you realise pretty quickly is
The KeyLab MkIII is also available in white...
out in time because they undermine what is otherwise a sublime controlling experience.
Arp Arpeggiators are very useful but often very standard affairs, and so my expectations here were fairly low. I’m thrilled to report that the KeyLab has a bunch of really cool features that could make it unexpectedly fun and interesting. It starts off looking normal enough, with a handful of uninspiring modes such as time division, octave range, swing and bpm. But if you press the Random button, you then get to play with the probabilistic nature behind the curtain. You can dial down the likelihood of each note triggering, you can increase the possibility of notes being skipped, you can mess about with the division, flow out and into octaves, push the gate length about, screw in some ratchets and float the velocity about the place. Suddenly, you’ve got a whole wave of interesting things happening and if you’re not sure what to do next, just hit the dice for instant semi-controlled mayhem.
of notes based on velocity or aftertouch. You can create your own chords, and that can be as simple as holding the Chord button and playing what you’re after. The only thing missing would be a quicker way to move between chord types, like maybe having a handful of types mapped to the mod wheel or a spare encoder so you could move between them in performance.
Conclusion Putting aside the Arturia mode for a moment, the KeyLab MkIII feels like a beautifully made MIDI controller with a premium keyboard and some really useful features. The Chord and Scale modes are nicely done, the arp is really great and fun to use, and the display, knobs and sliders are all top-notch. Working within the three DAWs I tried, the mixer and transport control is solid and the Device/Plug‑in mapping to the DAWs’ own plug-ins is brilliant. It’s an almost seamless experience. What would make this side of the equation perfect for me would be to have a third button within the DAW mode that lets you MIDI map to any other synth. It seems really weird to me
that you can’t do that without dropping out of DAW mode and into a User mode. Arturia’s vision for a seamless virtual instrument-driven experience is almost there, but unfortunately it currently misses the mark. When it works then the KeyLab-to-Analog Lab connection is fantastic and feels like a hardware synthesizer. It’s good too on other Arturia instruments, provided you stay within accepted parameters and do as you’re told. If Arturia can sort out the issues of remapping the filter and switching between their own synths within a DAW, then they’ll have a wonderfully integrated system. I think because other companies like Native Instruments, Novation and Akai Pro have similar systems of integrated control in place, our expectations of how well that works are much higher than they used to be. Arturia have shown that they have the potential to be all over this; they just have to squash the bugs. £ KeyLab MkIII 49 £379,
KeyLab MkIII 61 £466. Prices include VAT.
W www.sourcedistribution.co.uk W www.arturia.com
Chords & Scales Chord and Scale modes are very common in controllers, but the KeyLab makes good use of the display to give you a visual representation of what’s going on. You can select the root note and type of scale, and the result is shown on the display across two octaves of keys. There’s a good selection of scales, and you can create your own by turning keys on and off. When you play, any notes outside the scale are pulled into line, so you never play a wrong note. Chord mode is similarly solid with lots of types, added bass notes, revoicing and a really nice strumming feature. With the strumming, you can chose a direction and speed, like with an arpeggiator, but you can also add ‘Spread’, which will do interesting things like increase the range
www.soundonsound.com / December 2024
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ON TE ST
ACS Custom Emotion Dynamic In-ear Monitors
IEMs have transformed the on-stage experience for many performers, but they aren’t always ideal for bass players. Could a new hybrid design be the answer? ACS Custom Emotion Dynamic £895 pros • A fundamentally more familiar and satisfying IEM sound for bass players. • Isolation level options. • Ambient venting without LF loss. • Acoustic imaging that seems to extend outside the head.
cons • Pro-level price bracket.
summary A set of IEMs designed to make bass players happier may actually turn out to be just as helpful to players of other instruments. Not cheap, especially in custom-moulded form, but the tech may soon be available in affordable universal models too.
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DAV E LO C K WO O D
B
alanced-armature drivers are widely used for in-ear monitors (IEMs), being smaller and lighter than other types of drivers whilst offering a detailed, accurate sound, as well as a degree of efficiency — something that is particularly important in the battery-powered world of hearing aids for which this type of sub-miniature balanced armature was first developed. But balanced armatures work best when they are only asked to reproduce a specific range of frequencies, which means that for high-quality, full-range audio applications they generally have to be used in multiples, This introduces issues around crossovers, filters, integration and tuning. And, small as they are, there
is a limit to how many you can get inside something designed to fit in your ear! The dynamic drivers also used in some IEMs, by contrast, are effectively just miniature loudspeakers. With the weight of a wire ‘voice coil’, albeit a small one, on the back of the diaphragm, they can’t be as ‘fast’ as a balanced armature, but given its larger surface area, a dynamic driver is able to ‘move more air’, which is something you generally want at low frequencies. The latter, of course, is something of a generalisation, as you can build a balanced armature specifically to ‘move more air’ by giving it a more powerful motor and a bigger diaphragm, but then it is no longer as small and efficient... Logically enough, balanced armatures and dynamic drivers have been used together, utilising
the strengths of each technology, in conventional headphones for some time now, before inevitably spreading into the world of IEMs. It may sound simple enough, but combining two very different technologies within the tight confines of an IEM is actually anything but simple, and the fact that many IEMs use the same drivers and yet end up sounding significantly different perhaps tells us that there is more than a degree of expertise and artistry involved in their design and tuning.
IEMs & Bass Players Which brings us to the point of this review. I’ve been a custom-moulded-IEM user since 1997, with my first and all subsequent sets being made by one of the pioneers in this field, the British company ACS. I’ve had different sets over the years, as the technology has advanced but also because our ears don’t stay the same shape as we age, so it is necessary to have new scans taken from time to time to make sure that your custom moulds do actually achieve a proper seal against outside sound. My current pair is a multiple balanced armature set that I have been very happy with — at least until I was faced with the prospect of playing bass at a silent-stage venue. A few experiments soon revealed that whilst I felt I could hear the bass perfectly clearly in a mix, it didn’t ‘feel’ particularly comfortable or satisfying. More compression seemed to make it worse, and whilst EQ on individual monitor feeds is readily available in most digital mixers, the sort of EQ that might correct this issue is going to eat up headroom and potentially run into distortion. What I felt was missing, even when I was using high‑quality amp and speaker modelling, was the familiar sense of ‘weight’ and resonance in the bass sound. IEM-equipped bass players have sought out a number of innovative solutions to this problem, including vibrating
platforms or seats, body-worn vibration packs and, more recently... hybrid IEMs. The latter combine dynamic drivers and balanced armatures, with the cone driver’s ability to move air making the difference in terms of the perceived weight or impact in the low frequencies. Ultimate Ears, one of the leading USA-based IEM suppliers, have hybrid sets, and as I learned at the recent Sound On Sound GearFest UK show in London, so too do ACS. After verifying that my current models were still a perfect fit, ACS were able to use my existing ear scans to send me a custom-mould set of their new Emotion Dynamic hybrid in-ear monitors. But there’s a further complication here, in that I’ve been using IEMs equipped with ACS’s passive ambient filters. These allow a controlled amount of outside sound to leak in to facilitate communication, without my having to use ambient mics or hastily remove custom moulds whenever anyone tries to talk to me in anything other than sign language. Having now had that facility, I would never want to be without it, but good low-frequency IEM performance is usually said to rely on achieving a good seal in the ear. Keeping this passive ambient filter working without potentially undermining the extra low-frequency punch gained by incorporating the dynamic drivers looked like it might be a real design challenge.
Depth & Resonance My new custom moulds arrived in clear, medical-grade silicone, allowing me to see the full intricacy of the internal construction. The dynamic driver, made to a custom specification for ACS, is rear-vented with a tuning filter and has its own bore, being joined along the way by the bore from the ambient filter. A second bore acts as the outlet for the two balanced armatures that take care of the mids and highs, augmented by an extra balanced-armature ‘super-tweeter’.
Specifications Frequency range: 10Hz-22kHz. Input sensitivity: 108dB SPL/mW @ 1kHz. Impedance: 28Ω @ 1kHz. Noise isolation: tuned vented port with 10, 17 or 26 dB reduction of ambient noise. Drivers: Custom dynamic transducer, three Knowles balanced armatures (mid, high and super-high). Casing: Lacquered 40-Shore medical‑grade silicone. Cable: detachable 1.3m, with two-pin connection and memory ear hook. Connector: 3.5mm jack with included 1/4‑inch adaptor.
All very impressive looking, but does it work as intended? Yes, I think it does. The bass has the same basic tonality as it did before, but now there’s more of what I can only describe as resonance — the kind of cabinet-formant-tone resonance that is the difference between playing with a really clean DI and an actual speaker. It just feels a bit more like I’m playing bass through an amp behind me, even without any of the very specific physical sensation that brings. It is tempting to imagine that there might be some small amount of physical coupling from this design, but if there is, then it is nothing that I can discern without scientific vibration instrumentation. On balance, I think this extra depth is just being done with sound. The very low end does seem like it is sensibly curated without being too conservative — the low ‘B’ on my Stingray 5 doesn’t threaten to detach my fillings, but there is still some heft to it all the way down. So, job done on that count, but, of course, you don’t just listen to yourself in an in-ears mix: the rest of the balance has to sound right, too. And by ‘right’, I mean the sound that gives you what you need in a live-performance situation. I’m sure it is different in the world of IEMs for hi-fi listening, but
What Is A Balanced Armature? The ‘armature’ bit is just a small metal strip or ‘reed’ that is pivoted in the centre to hold it in the middle of a coil of wire that sits within the field of a permanent magnet. We use the term ‘balanced’ because the magnetic force on the reed is precisely equal from both poles of the magnet. So, it just sits there, until you apply an alternating current to the coil, inducing a magnetic force in the armature that pushes and pulls it between the opposite poles of the permanent magnet, corresponding with the polarity of the electrical signal. So far, still no actual sound, of course: the sound we hear comes from
a small, lightweight diaphragm, mounted within the same casing, driven into vibration by a physical connection from one end of the armature and vented to the outside world through a small hole. Why bother making sound this way? Well, it can all be extremely small, as the coil only has to be big enough to induce movement in the tiny, lightweight armature, as opposed to the voice coil in a conventional speaker, where the coil has to move itself in the magnetic gap, in order to move the cone it is attached to.
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Tascam Model 2400
Mixer, Multitrack Recorder & Audio Interface Tascam’s new recording mixer is the most flexible Model‑series console yet. M AT T H O U G H TO N
I
reviewed Tascam’s Model 24 in SOS February 2019 (https://sosm.ag/ tascam-model-24) and the smaller Model 12 in SOS December 2020 (https:// sosm.ag/tascam-model-12). With new and improved features, the latter addressed many of the issues I raised when assessing the Model 24, and the Model 16 then added more channels. Now, Tascam have released the flagship mixer in this range: the Model 2400 includes almost all the Model 12’s improvements and introduces
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more features. Larger and heavier than the Model 24, it has more channels and more analogue I/O, but it remains portable enough that it’s easy to stick in the car.
Overview The Model 2400 is, at heart, an analogue mixer, with one-knob compression on 12 of the 22 input channels, and a three-band EQ on all of them. There are four stereo subgroups, five aux sends (three pre-fader, one post-fader, one switchable pre/post), a stereo digital effects processor to which you can send from any track, and a separate
stereo digital EQ and compressor for the master bus. There are insert points for 12 input channels and the master bus, and an array of other facilities that I’ll cover below. But what makes the Model 2400 different from most mixers is its 24/22 (in/ out) channels of 16‑/24-bit and 44.1/48 kHz A-D/D-A conversion. This makes possible recording standalone to an SDXC card (up to 512GB) or, over USB, to Mac, Windows or iOS/iPadOS devices. For Mac and iOS you don’t need drivers for USB interfacing, but there’s a useful ModelMixer app whose main purpose is to
Click Tracks The onboard click can be routed to the control room and headphones outputs, or to the dedicated click output. It can’t be routed directly to the aux outputs, which surprised me, but you can plug a jack patch cable from the click out into an input channel, and from there can route the sound to the auxes. As with the delay effect, the click supports tap tempo, accessed either from a button on the top panel or using an attached momentary footswitch. As described in the main text, there are various time signatures to choose from, but I didn’t find a way to change time signature or (other than tap) the tempo within a song. For such projects, though, you could always prepare a session in your DAW, render the click or more detailed backing track, and import that to the Model 2400.
provide more extensive metering than the hardware. Windows users also have this app but need the ASIO/WDM driver; both these drivers can access the hardware, so two apps using the same sample rate can communicate with the mixer simultaneously. With five-pin DIN MIDI out and in sockets on the rear, the Model 2400 can act as a USB MIDI interface. It can also output MIDI Time Code and Clock. The USB connection also allows you to transfer files to and from the SD card, to back up data or load stored projects.
Recording
Tascam Model 2400 £1835 pros • Sounds decent. • More inserts, more subgroups, more auxes, more outputs... • Can record pre- or post-processing. • Click track makes computerless recording a breeze.
cons • No polarity inversion.
summary Tascam’s impressive Model series of recording mixers continues to evolve, and this flagship model offers more inserts, more subgroups, more auxes and, thus, many more potential applications than any of the other mixers in the range.
Recording standalone or to a computer, the 24 inputs are for the mixer’s 22 input channels plus the stereo mix, while the 22 outputs are routed back to the main input channels, just before their insert point (or for those without one, the compressor). As with the Model 12 and 16 (not the 24), a button above the channel compressor/EQ sets the point in the signal path sent to the A-D converter: before or after the processing stages, by which I mean anything patched into the insert, as well as the onboard compressor and EQ. A simple touch, but it makes the mixer more versatile than the Model 24: you could record a clean signal post the preamps and HPF, while using the inserts, compressors and EQs for a cue mix or live performance; or use the processing and commit what you hear to ‘tape’. Whichever’s the case, you can break a mix back out onto the mixer and use the insert
and processing stages again. This welcome A-D routing flexibility is as on the Model 12, but many more input channels have an insert point (12, compared with the Model 12 and 16’s two), so integrating outboard is a much more realistic proposition. The standalone recording process is also pretty much as on the Model 12. You can create a song, set up a click track, and change the tempo and time signature. Each track has a record-arm button so you can record anything from a single track to all of them. Some more advanced functions make good use of the screen, the Multi Jog push/ twist encoder and buttons, such as manual or automatic punching in and markers — if you fluff a note or two, you can flag that up, or sing along and drop in a better part rather than retake the whole performance or rely on edits and pitch-shifting later on. Since you can also import files from the SD card, you can prepare backing tracks on a computer for use on standalone sessions (or as live backing tracks). Computers make so much possible, but when I don’t have to look at a screen while making music I prefer not to. And the simple fact of having so many tracks with inserts available makes working this way much more attractive. Still, some prefer to use a DAW, and as well as being an interface the Model 2400 can serve as a basic HUI or MCU controller. For example, the mixer’s transport buttons control your DAW transport, the Multi Jog becomes a scrub wheel, you can create and navigate to markers, and the 16 record‑arm buttons arm your DAW tracks. Notably, there’s no fader control, but you can still use all the channels of the USB audio and MIDI interface, and there’s enough control to be useful. Tascam have created dedicated profiles for various DAWs, and this is detailed in the DAW Control PDF manual on Tascam’s website.
Bus Processing & Effects I’ve mentioned insert points already and, importantly, it’s not just the input channels
The Model 2400 has far greater analogue connectivity than previous models in the series, with dedicated subgroup and aux outputs, master-bus insert points on the rear, and 12 input channels featuring insert points on the top panel.
www.soundonsound.com / December 2024
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FE ATURE
The SOS team pick their favourite hardware and software from the last 12 months.
Cranborne Audio Carnaby HE2
Studio Hardware This year, Cranborne became one of only a small handful of companies to offer a plug-in remote-controlled analogue outboard processor, and their Carnaby HE2 is something very special indeed. The digital control side of things is, from a user perspective, refreshingly unfussy — the plug-in works well, and the hardware ‘feels’ analogue — but there are also some ingenious extras. Importantly, the clever analogue circuitry combines EQ with per-band saturation to deliver effects I’ve not heard from any other manufacturer. The price isn’t ‘aspirational’ either. Definitely a winning combination! Matt Houghton https://sosm.ag/cranborne-carnaby-500 Sticking with the plug-in remote-controlled hardware theme, Wes Audio have achieved amazing things with their ‘ng’ processors. Every time one comes to me for review, I conclude that Wes must have taken the concept about as far as it can go — yet, next time, they always push the concept forward in imaginative ways. Their ngTube
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Wes Audio ngTube EQ
EQ is, at heart, a four-band passive mastering EQ with a switchable valve and transformer output stage. It sounds divine. But it also showcases several novel features, including a revamped approach to plug-in remote control, a context-sensitive screen, and touch-responsive controls that access many useful ‘hidden’ features. Will it be the pinnacle of Wes Audio’s achievements? Only time will tell, but when it comes to digitally controlled analogue outboard, everyone else is playing catch-up. Matt Houghton https://sosm.ag/ngTubeEQ SSL’s PureDrive Octo rackmounting mic preamp provides superb audio specs, with an incredible
90dB gain range, and a blizzard of additional features including filtering, switchable ‘colour’ options, variable impedance, built-in A-D conversion and even USB interfacing. And at not much more than £200 per channel, it’s remarkable value for money. Sam Inglis https://sosm.ag/ssl-puredrive
Another EQ? Really? Yep. And it’s another one that sounds great and has features that make it stand out from the crowd. With only six knobs (three being dual-concentric) and a handful of toggle switches, the Undertone UTEQ-500 gives you access to pretty much any curve you can imagine, including the possibility of notch filters! Speaking of curves, while you can master basic console-style EQ’ing on this module pretty swiftly, if you’re to get the most out of it, there’s a bit of a learning curve. But get your head Undertone around it and operation becomes Audio UTEQ-500
Teaching Machines Wellspring Atomic Analog Special OP-6
SSL B-Dyn 611B
AEA TRP3 & RPQ3
second nature. So much power in such a tiny package. Matt Houghton https://sosm.ag/uteq-500
sounds incredible — on mics, as a DI, and as a line-level saturation processor. Sam Inglis https://sosm.ag/aa-special-op6
The Teaching Machines Wellspring is an analogue spring reverb, but it’s also much more than just a reverb device. With its analogue delay, modulation and filter sections, it’s a box that invites and encourages you to create unusual and original effects. It can be a superb‑sounding straight-up, luxurious spring reverb if needed, but the real fun is deciding if the world (or your client!) is ready for the sonic statement you’ve created with this excellent sounding all-analogue stereo effects device! Neil Rogers https://sosm.ag/tm-wellspring
AEA’s TRP and RPQ preamps have always been special, but the new third generation raise their performance to the true pinnacle of engineering excellence. Although originally designed for passive ribbons, the current TRP3’s capabilities reach far wider, and the latest design offers phantom power and can be used with any microphone. The unusually high input impedance minimises the load on dynamic and transformerless capacitor microphones, allowing them to deliver their best possible sound quality. And with up to 85dB of switch-selected gain, even the least sensitive mics and the quietest of sources can be raised to a useful signal level with ease. The discrete TRP3 design boasts one of the lowest noise floors of any preamp, while also enjoying incredibly low harmonic distortion, a huge bandwidth, and generous headroom. This all translates to a phenomenally detailed and accurate, yet tonally neutral preamp — the apocryphal ‘straight wire with gain’. The RPQ3 occupies 1U of rack space instead of the half-rack format of the TRP3, and provides a more versatile EQ facility plus a balanced insert option, but is otherwise identical in performance. Hugh Robjohns https://sosm.ag/trp3-rpq3
Plug-ins can be so good these days that it takes something special to make me want to route a signal ‘out of the box’ when mixing. SSL’s B-Dyn 611B is one such device, and I was surprised by just how much I enjoyed putting it through its paces this year. Yes, it’s an SSL dynamics processor (there’s both a compressor and an expander/gate on board), and with that company’s reputation you’d expect it to be decent. But having used both the E-Dyn and plug-in versions of both the E and B type processors before, I wasn’t expecting this module to sound quite so distinctively punchy, aggressive and in-your-face as it does. Not your ‘use on everything’ compressor, but a very handy tool that I love. I’ve still not been able to dial in the same effects with plug-ins, or even get close quickly. Matt Houghton https://sosm.ag/ssl-b-dyn You don’t need an Atomic Analog Special OP-6. I don’t need an Atomic Analog Special OP-6. But having tried it, I couldn’t bear to part with it. This modern recreation of RCA’s venerable valve preamp just
Monitoring Monitor controllers may be functional rather than glamorous, but the right one can make a huge difference to any control room. In terms of features, ergonomics and sound quality, the Radial Nuance Select is pretty much the perfect fit for me and my setup. It’s also built to survive anything that studio life could throw at it. I bought one! Sam Inglis https://sosm.ag/radial-nuance-select
SSL PureDrive Octo
ADAM Audio A8H
The A8H marks ADAM Audio’s impressive entry into the compact three-way monitor market. Its new MLM bass and DCH midrange drivers, paired with ADAM’s signature X-ART pleated ribbon tweeter and a tri-power hybrid PWM and Class‑A/B amplification setup, produce a seemingly effortless wide, deep, detailed and solidly centred soundfield. ADAM’s updated A-Control software simplifies the process of configuring the AH8, and its integration with Sonarworks’ SoundID Reference room calibration software helps deliver a flat response at your listening position. Its outstanding audio performance and attractive price point offer outstanding value for money — so much so that I bought a pair. Bob Thomas https://sosm.ag/adam-a8h I can’t quite remember how I came across the AIAIAI Unit-4, but I’m really pleased that I did. The Unit-4 is a compact and portable battery‑powerable monitoring
Radial Nuance Select
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INSIDE TRACK
Sean Cook & Nevin Sastry: ‘A Bar Song (Tipsy)’
The biggest hit of the decade so far took Shaboozey and his team half an hour to write — and weeks to perfect. PAUL TINGEN
“I ‘A Bar Song (Tipsy)’ has enjoyed record-breaking success on the Billboard Hot 100.
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t was crazy,” remembers Sean Cook. “It wasn’t a planned thing. It was wild. We were working on ‘Annabelle’, a song on the album, and we were like, ‘Let’s take a break.’ Nevin and I were joking around on guitar, playing whatever chords came to mind, and Shaboozey responded with some words and melodies. In that moment it just happened. We went with it, and boom, the song gods gave us
this idea! We weren’t really thinking. For me it was a blur. “Shaboozey knew right away that we had something special. I also had a gut feeling, and put my iPhone on record and set it to the side. I recorded the whole song being written in a 30-minute voice memo. Afterwards, in about 15 minutes, we cut Shaboozey’s lead vocal. We later recut a couple lines, but 95 percent of his vocal is from that day, which is shocking because Boozey is very particular with vocals. But he was like, ‘Don’t change it!’”
Along with Shaboozey himself, Sean Cook (left) and Nevin Sastry were the main production and writing team behind ‘A Bar Song’ and its parent album.
“Sometimes when making an album,” adds Nevin Sastry, “you’re trying to fill a spot. This was absolutely not that. It was just us having fun, messing around. And it turned out great. In the clip that Sean has on his voice memo while we were writing it, you can hear Shaboozey saying, ‘This is my country number one. I know.’”
Magic Moment At that moment in November 2023, the three musicians in the room — Sean Cook, Nevin Sastry and Collins Chibueze, aka Shaboozey — knew they had struck gold. Even so, none of them could have predicted what would follow. At the time
of writing, Shaboozey’s ‘A Bar Song (Tipsy)’ has been number one on the US Billboard Hot 100 singles chart for 15 weeks. By the time you’re reading this, you will know whether ‘A Bar Song’ will have surpassed the current US record of 19 weeks at number one, set in 2019 by another crossover country song, Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus’ ‘Old Town Road’. ‘A Bar Song’ has made Shaboozey the first black male artist to top Billboard’s Hot Country Songs and Hot 100 charts at the same time, immediately after Beyoncé had paved the way by becoming the first black artist to do the same with ‘Texas Hold ’Em’. In fact, Beyoncé’s number one album Cowboy Carter, released in March 2024, helped introduce Shaboozey to a wider audience, thanks to guest performances that were in themselves inspired by ‘A Bar Song’. This was the result of a showcase Shaboozey did in January at Winston House in Venice Beach, LA, appearing on stage with Cook and Sastry. “We were only showcasing four songs,” says Sastry, “and although we had not quite completed the production of ‘A Bar Song’, we decided that we had to perform it. So the three of us performed the song with a backing track that was pretty close to what the world would eventually hear. The reactions were crazy. We saw everybody from everywhere in the bar run to the stage. Shaboozey was still a bit skeptical about the 808 that Sean and I had put at the end of the song, but when he saw the audience reaction when the 808s came in and rumbled the stage, he was like, ‘OK, I get it.’” “I’ve never seen anything like it,” agrees Cook. “When the pre-chorus started, 20 people immediately walked in from the other room, asking, ‘What song is this?’ It’s the first time I’ve ever seen the energy shift instantly like that! Apparently, the show also led to Shaboozey being invited to appear on her album. That night and that song are such a launching pad for everything, it’s crazy.”
Getting To The Start As is always the case, the 30 minutes of magic that produced ‘A Bar Song’ were made possible by a long history of production and writing work. “I’m an Indian kid from Ohio,” explains Nevin Sastry. “I started playing piano and guitar when I was 12, and did all the guitar shredding and so on, which led
me to jazz. I then went to med school and worked as a doctor, but in 2016, when I was 24, I decided that music was my calling, and moved to LA. I’m a guitarist, writer and producer, and first met Shaboozey in 2016. He ended up moving into my apartment. He signed with Republic that year, and through that I signed with Savan Kotecha, a producer who worked with Max Martin. “Having come from making beats in my bedroom, pure instinct, I got to learn from the Max Martin crowd! Savan got me to really cut my teeth. I worked on Shaboozey’s first album, Lady Wrangler [2018], but because it was hard to make money through placements, I also did a lot of music for sync. I did all the music for two seasons for a CBBC kids show called Almost Never. I had to write and produce and cut all these covers and mix and master everything for TV. To learn more, I spent a lot of late nights watching YouTube videos and reading Sound On Sound!” Sean Cook, meanwhile, grew up in Southern California, mostly Sevenoaks and Orange County. “My mum was a vocal teacher and my dad a guitar teacher, and they wanted me to play music in church. I learned to play guitar and bass, and was playing basketball competitively, but after an injury I went into making beats to pass time. My dad said, ‘These are actually pretty good,’ and I got an internship with a producer, which opened me up to the idea of it being a job. I played in a lot of bands in my 20s, but always with a producer brain, wanting to be in the studio writing and producing songs.” Like Sastry, Cook eventually signed a publishing deal as a songwriter. He first met Shaboozey in 2020, and worked with the artist on his second album, Cowboys Live Forever, Outlaws Never Die (2022), a title that already revealed clear country inclinations, despite the artist starting out as a rapper. Cook: “When I first met him, he said, ‘I’m from Virginia, and want to have a sound that really represents Virginia.’ He grew up listening to Willie Nelson, but also Young Thug, and wanted to combine both worlds.”
Crossing Boundaries In 2023, when Cook and Shaboozey were about to start work on the artist’s third album, Shaboozey suggested involving Sastry, who had contributed to one song on Cowboys Live Forever. Sastry
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Native Instruments Kontakt 8
Software Sampler
NI’s long-established software sampler gains a raft of new features and other improvements.
JOHN WALDEN
O
ver the last 20 or more years Kontakt has become an essential tool for countless musicians and producers. A new version is, therefore, something that both the user and developer communities will look forward to with anticipation and, perhaps, just a little trepidation. So, with the release of Kontakt 8, what have Native Instruments done to refine and improve upon one of the world’s most widely used pieces of music software?
First Kontakt As before, Kontakt 8 is available in both full (paid‑for) and streamlined Player (free to use but with some limitations) versions. Both can run standalone or in a plug-in (VST3, AU and AAX) format. As well as an individual product, both Kontakt versions are also available as part of NI’s various Komplete bundles. These bundles have also been updated and a separate SOS review of Komplete 15 will follow shortly. For existing Kontakt users, the reworking of the UI will be the most immediately obvious change in v8. This exploits some significant graphical enhancements under the hood but, if
Native Instruments Kontakt 8 £269 pros • Conflux brings hybrid sample/synth technology to Kontakt. • Chords, Phrases and Leap add plenty of new creative options. • Lots of interesting under-the-hood changes for developers to exploit.
cons • Not every Kontakt user might see the new creative tools as essential to their personal workflow?
summary Kontakt 8 brings a slick UI revamp and some impressive new creative options. It will be very interesting to see where the Kontakt development community take some of the underlying technology.
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Kontakt 8 features a UI refresh with several new content categories available within the main Browser.
you prefer the previous look, just opt for Classic View from the View menu and you can switch back to the earlier design. There are a number of notable changes in the redesign. For example, on the Library page, there are now six main tabs — Instrument, Combined, Tools, Leap, Loops and One-shots — and I’ll touch on all of these below. Once you have selected and loaded a specific preset from a library, as before, the main instrument UI dominates the Kontakt window, but you now get the Side Pane (it can be toggled on/off as preferred) on the left. This contains sections for Tools (more on these in a minute) and Instruments but, very usefully, it provides a compact version of the browser, giving you instant access to your entire Kontakt content including the presets for any loaded instrument.
Conflux Instrument The full version of Kontakt includes a significant new instrument called Conflux. NI describe this as a something of a first in that it blends synthesis with Kontakt’s usual sample-based sound creation in a hybrid design. This is provided by a complete reworking of Kontakt’s existing wavetable synthesis
engine, adding FM, phase modulation and ring modulation wavetable oscillators to the existing PPG wavetables. Conflux’s control set is laid out across three pages; Play, Edit and Settings. The first of these provides easy access to the presets and a set of macro-style controls but the Edit page is where the full potential of the synth engine can be accessed. Here, the Source panel provides access to the Wavetable and Sample oscillator choices, and the ability to blend and adjust the balance of these two elements. The Audio Mod panel adds an additional sound source, offering three modes; Audio Mod, Shaper and Oscillator. The first two provide additional manipulation of the wavetable source but the third provides an independent virtual‑analogue oscillator that can be blended into the overall sound. The engine offers a filter, two LFOs, two envelopes, two flexible effects slots, delay, reverb and a step animator. Alongside the six macro controls (each of which can be used to modulate multiple parameters), this makes for plenty of modulation sources and lots of suitable modulation targets. Linking sources to targets is all done graphically and is easy to configure, although a MIDI Learn option for linking the
six macro knobs to an external hardware controller would be a nice thing to see. That said, hardware control was easy enough to map using the features in my DAW host. Sonically, Conflux is impressive and involving. It perhaps won’t be an obvious pick for your bread-and-butter pop or EDM sounds, but for media composers or the more experimentally minded looking for some quirky sonic elements or evolving otherworldly soundscapes, it’s a great choice.
New Tool Box Kontakt 8 includes a new Tools concept. This first iteration sees two such Tools introduced; Chords and Phrases. I’ll explore these below, but two things are worth noting. First, these Tools can be used with every Kontakt instrument. As shown in the screenshots, the side pane includes a Tools section at the top, allowing you to add Tools that might then be utilised with whatever instruments are also present. Second, and quite impressively, these new Tools are included in both the full (paid) and Player (free) versions of Kontakt with no restrictions; every Kontakt user gets access. NI have suggested that there will be further Tools to come so watch this space.
Chords Systems for triggering full chords via a single MIDI note are a familiar concept and many DAWs or virtual instruments have such options built into their feature set. However, the new Chords Tool embeds chord triggering directly into Kontakt and is usable with any Kontakt instrument. The Chords UI shows
the seven chords with a chord set as concentric circle graphics that represent the chord’s notes. The tag-based browser lets you easily search the impressive selection of presets to find either a new chord set or an individual chord, while dice icons allow you to randomly change chord sets or individual chords. There are also plenty of options to adjust or adapt the presets. For example, at the top right you can adjust the key/scale used and the individual chords within the currently loaded set will adapt themselves automatically. If you click on an individual chord circle, you can access the ‘record’ option and manually create a chord, including its full voicing, and you can save your own chord set presets (just right-click on the Chords entry in the side pane to access the appropriate drop-down menu). Chords does, of course, let you create a full chord performance (including velocity sensitivity) with a single finger, and chord labels can be displayed as you trigger them. You can also apply a little Humanize (including velocity/timing variation and note skipping) or Strum (up or down with control over speed) while performing. If you record your performance, it’s the trigger notes that get recorded (and then re-triggered on playback) rather than the full chord voicing. You can Conflux’s Edit page provides plenty of sound design options for those wanting to go beyond the included presets.
The new Chords Tool embeds chord triggering directly within Kontakt for use with any of your installed libraries.
drag-and-drop MIDI data for individual chords, or the full chord set, to your DAW, but you would then have to build a performance from these MIDI notes. It would be a nice addition if Chords had an ‘export full MIDI note data’ option built into its UI. I did think Kontakt’s Send MIDI To Outside World setting (found in the Options panel) might make this possible, but I couldn’t seem to make it function as I expected. That comment aside though, Chords is both very easy to use and the presets contain lots of interesting chord set combinations that — paired with the right sound — can be instantly inspiring.
Phrases With a similar UI, Phrases offers you a set of seven melodic phrases that can be triggered via the white keys. Again, a circular display provides a graphical indication of the note pattern within each phrase. Key and scale can be adjusted, and the phrases will adjust to fit. Phrase triggering behaviour can also be adjusted (including a Latch option) and, via the Edit page (accessed from the small pencil icon located top right), you can adjust a whole range of parameters such as note length, quantise, velocity, phrase length and playback direction, either globally (all phrases in a set) or to a single phrase. Equally, things like the Rotate and Invert knobs, which both create interesting changes in the performance of a specific phrase, can be automated in your DAW to add further performance variations on the fly. The large Randomize button randomises many of the time, pitch and velocity parameters, and the mod wheel acts as a global dynamics control, letting
www.soundonsound.com / December 2024
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Kii Seven Active Monitors
Kii’s impressive new cardioid monitors prove there’s still room for innovation in loudspeaker design.
PHIL WARD
I
t was back in the January 2017 issue that we reviewed the then-new and remarkable Kii Three active cardioid monitor. For a significant number of professional engineers and consumer audiophiles, the Kii Three set the benchmark for what is possible from a pair of loudspeakers. And now, after a somewhat extended gestation period, Kii have launched a smaller sibling: the Kii Seven. I mentioned both the professional and consumer markets, and that’s because Kii have been unusually successful in both sectors with the Three. Kii are one of very few speaker manufacturers who have pulled off that trick. Dynaudio and PMC, for example, have successful
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consumer audio product lines alongside their professional monitors, but not with the same speakers. A Kii Three sold as a studio monitor is the same as a Kii Three sold as a consumer hi-fi speaker. Now, this not only demonstrates, as I’ve always believed, that a good loudspeaker is a good loudspeaker however it’s used, it has also impacted on the design of the Kii Seven. Because, while this review is going to concentrate on its performance and suitability for nearfield monitoring, there’s a lot about the Seven that is aimed at consumer applications. For a start, it is to be sold in singles, for use as a mono, stand-alone audio player. It’s an expensive way of playing Spotify from your kitchen table, but that’s never hampered Bang & Olufsen, for example. It’s perhaps fortunate that this review will primarily
concern professional applications, because at the time of writing some of the consumer streaming features of the Seven aren’t fully implemented. The reasons for this, I suspect, are not so much technical as commercial, because navigating the licence demands required to implement multiple streaming services on the same product is far from trivial. However, Kii say that by the time these words are published, Spotify and Tidal streaming will very likely be available or imminently so, and that Apple Airplay, Qobuz and ROON Ready will follow as soon as the third‑party certification processes are complete.
Going Pro Let’s leave all that consumer streaming malarky behind and concentrate on the Kii
Kii Seven £7785 pros • Extraordinary combination of bandwidth, low coloration and low distortion. • Cardioid character means more monitor and less room. • Reveals mix detail like nothing else. • Stereo imaging to die for.
cons • None (apart from the cost, obviously).
summary The Kii Seven might have taken a while to arrive, but it was so worth the wait. It’s an extraordinary monitor.
Seven in a studio environment. If you’re familiar with the appearance and design of the Kii Three, the look of the Seven won’t come as a great surprise. It sports a very similar aesthetic and is the same width as the Three, but it’s significantly less tall and less deep. It’s dimensionally better suited to compact studio spaces than the Kii Three – especially in its reduced depth. The Seven’s enclosure construction is of the same foamed structural polyurethane as the Three, with the same black‑finished aluminium trim panels. It comes in either white or dark grey finishes, and Kii say that the custom colour options of the Kii Three will not be available for the Seven. Like the Three, the Seven has bass drivers located in each side panel, but it does without the Three’s additional two rear‑panel bass drivers. This perhaps makes for easier installation because, where the Three demands at least 8cm of free space to the rear, the Seven can be used with its rear panel hard up against the wall. In fact, Kii recommend that if a pair of Sevens is to be used in close proximity to a rear wall, they are best located right up against it. The Seven does come with one positioning constraint, though, and that concerns space either side to allow the side-mounted bass driver room to ‘breathe’. Kii Designer Bruno Putzeys put it to me this way: “An obstacle should be further away than the size of the Kii Seven or the obstacle, whichever is greatest.” This of course means that you might need to avoid additional monitors sharing a shelf with Kii Sevens, but without wishing to spill the beans before getting to the end of the review, considering the
presence of other monitors if you have a pair of Kii Sevens might be a moot point.
Beam Me Up The side‑panel drivers are nominally 140mm‑diameter, aluminium-diaphragm units — the same as those employed in the Kii Three. And while they nominally work in parallel up to around 125Hz, where they hand over to the midrange driver, things aren’t quite that simple, because the secondary job of the side-mounted bass drivers is to help create the Seven’s cardioid characteristics, by overlapping with output from the midrange driver to modify its directionality. This overlap works all the way up to around 900Hz, where the cardioid character that results from the Kii Seven’s enclosure dimensions begins to take effect. In blithely writing that the LF and MF driver outputs “overlap” to yield a cardioid radiation pattern, I’ve simplified something that’s actually been achieved through the combination of deep electro-acoustic understanding and some complex DSP. Kii describe the technique as “beam-forming”, and it involves a beam-forming filter fed from the output of the midrange driver’s band-pass filter. The filter’s output is then routed to the bass driver feed after the
output of its low-pass filter. The bass drivers are consequently employed in the overlap region, in parallel with their low‑frequency duties, to manipulate the summed mid and bass driver output to create the cardioid radiation pattern. The schematic of Diagram 1 illustrates the general arrangement of the Kii Seven signal flow and filtering. In their conventional role, the bass drivers work with closed-box loading up to a fourth-order (24dB/octave) low-pass roll-off at 125Hz. In contrast to the Kii Three, where cardioid radiation extends all the way down to 50Hz thanks to the combination of both rear‑ and side‑firing bass drivers, the Kii Seven displays cardioid radiation only from about 125Hz upwards. This might appear to constitute a compromise, but with Kii Sevens likely to be installed much closer to a rear wall than the Kii Threes, it is in practice probably not a particularly big deal. And anyway, it’s the cardioid character in the low midrange, where the musical fundamentals of mix elements such as voices reside, that I think really makes the difference. The likelihood of Sevens being used in close proximity to room boundaries has resulted in Kii including some boundary EQ options within the setup menus of the
A cutaway render of the tweeter waveguide and lens. The lens broadens the tweeter’s directivity at the top end of its frequency range, while the waveguide narrows it at the lower end.
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ON TE ST
PreSonus Studio One Pro 7 DAW Software Studio One Pro 7 is a solid upgrade with something for almost everyone. ROBIN VINCENT
I
n their typically understated manner, PreSonus have declared that Studio One Pro 7 is the “One DAW for All”. It sounds ambitious, but with the new version I have before me, that claim is almost but not entirely unreasonable. Except that the tagline actually refers to the fact that PreSonus have killed off Studio One Prime and Artist, so now it’s all about Studio One Pro. With this adjustment comes a new pricing structure, giving you a perpetual licence and year of updates for $199. You can upgrade that every year for $149 or opt for the Studio One Pro + subscription for $179 per annum, which gets you a lot of added extras and includes the perpetual licence. PreSonus are also trying to stick to a more predictable feature release schedule.
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Significant updates will come three or four times a year, rather than holding things back for a single major update every two years, as has been the case up until now. For this review, I’m looking at the regular Studio One Pro 7 without any additional thrills or spills, but the first thing you notice is that it comes with many of them anyway. Pro 7 includes the Batch Converter, Presence XT Editor, Lead Architect and Deep Flight One, all of which were additional extras for version 6. So, it’s less money for more stuff. I like this update already. The top new features in version 7 include AI-powered stem separation, Splice integration, integrated Launcher, Global Transpose and a new mode for Impact, all of which I’ll dip into. But there are more things twinkling away in this shiny new version that are worth a look, not least of which is the unexpected CV Instrument casually hanging out in the Instruments folder.
AI-powered Stem Separation Stem separation is all the rage these days, and Studio One is not one to be
left behind for long. On the website, PreSonus say that the technology is still in its infancy, so further performance/ quality improvements are planned. I confess to sharing their restrained level of scepticism. That is, until I came up with something to use it for, and now I’m having far too much fun. I have a lot of old songs knocking around drives that are no longer attached to multitrack projects, either because of carelessness, misadventure or because software is no longer available. Using stem separation, I can regain a certain amount of control, get back into the mix and breathe new life into these tunes. The process is very simple. Drag your mixed music file onto a track, right-click, and you’ll find Separate Stems under the Audio menu. It throws up a window where you can select which of the four stems you want to extract: Vocals, Drums, Bass and Other. There’s also a check box you can tick if you want to remix it directly back into a single file again. So, for instance, you can create a mix without vocals with a single click. That’s a neat little feature.
Otherwise, the four stems are thrown into a folder underneath the original track, which has now been disabled. Does it work? Yes and no. Yes, because this really is remarkable technology, the process is smooth and the results are largely clean and well separated. But also no, for more or less the same reasons. I found when removing vocals that there were often ghostly voices in reverb tails and sort of squashed artefacts in the mid frequencies where the singer used to be. When soloing the vocals, there’s often a lingering sense and sometimes a definite bleed of other instruments. I guess that is the stem separation conundrum; the results tend to be ‘not bad’ or ‘pretty good’ rather than drop-dead fantastic. However, for reworking old mixes, isolating reasonably clean samples, and for working up new ideas from existing material, it has found itself to be useful. I ran some comparisons with the stem separation in Image Line’s FL Studio. The results were largely similar, with FL Studio occasionally doing a slightly better job of isolating vocals, but they all suffer from the same separation artefacts. It can vary a lot depending on the source material, and it makes you wish there were some settings you could adjust to tweak the process in some way.
Tempo Map Detection One particular stem separation scenario wraps in nicely with the new ability to generate a tempo map from a recorded performance. You can imagine receiving a mixed demo from someone, maybe voice and guitar or piano, and you’d like to flesh out a project around that performance.
Pulling the voice and accompaniment apart gives you much more room to develop the music around it. However, it probably wasn’t recorded to a click track, so the timing naturally ebbs and flows a bit. Fitting it into the Studio One grid can be a challenge, and while there are all sorts of tools, from groove extractions for quantising to time-stretching transients to get things under control, it doesn’t always feel right. With Tempo Map Detection, you can make the grid follow the changing tempo of the performance rather than forcing the performance to fit the grid. Under the Audio menu you’ll find an option to ‘extract to the tempo track’, and all the variations in tempo will appear as a wiggly line. You can now add patterns and loops and have them all follow the tempo of the original piece.
Splice Integration Third-party integrations tend to make me feel suspicious. More often than not, they are trying to sell me something. Some, like the TuneCore integration, save you a few clicks but require you to sign on with the distribution service. Others, like Melodyne, give you fantastic tools along with the suggestion that things could be even better if you upgraded. So, I was undecided how excited I should be about the integration into the browser of sample‑library powerhouse Splice. If you are already a subscriber, then this is all gravy, but if you’re not, then the question is, will it bring awesome things to your project, or is it a ruse to opt you into an unexpected subscription? In between the Loops and Files tabs in the browser we now have ‘Splice’. Click on it, and you find a search box, some
PreSonus Studio One Pro 7 £179 pros • The Launcher is a solid development. • Pricing and included content are good value for money. • Polyrhythmic melodic patterns. • CV Instrument. • Splice integration is amazing for subscribers. • The inevitable stem separation does all right.
cons • You need an extra subscription to use Splice. • Launcher features are quite rudimentary. • Nothing new for mastering engineers or live performers. • No new synths or plug-ins.
summary Studio One Pro 7 keeps itself in the game with stem separation and a clip launcher, while introducing attractive pricing and update schedules. It remains a solid and mature platform that can serve the needs of a wide range of users with genuine style and substance.
categories to browse and a big box with the words ‘Search With Sound’ on it. The idea is that you drag a clip or two, a chorus, verse or anything up to eight bars, into the box, and its AI algorithms will go off and retrieve a bunch of loops that fit with what you’re doing. It’s pretty much on the money every time. The loops are tempo-matched and in the right key, ready to be dropped into your project — this is brilliant. It beats scrolling through old sample folders looking for something that might but usually won’t fit. Initially it offers up around 50 possibilities taken from a spread of categories covering
We all love separating stems — well now you can do it in Studio One.
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SPOTLIGHT
SPL MTC Mk2
Desktop Monitor Controllers In the age of mixer-less studios, monitor controllers are on the rise! LUKE WOOD
T
he first thing that springs to mind when you think of analogue consoles is likely their front end — the mic preamps, filters, EQs, dynamics processors, and so on — but their monitoring sections also played a hugely important role in the traditional studio, providing a convenient way to switch between input sources and speaker systems, set monitoring levels, communicate with artists and quickly check a mix’s mono compatibility, among other things. Many studios today have no console; we often look to modern audio interfaces, DAW software and plug-ins now to provide some of these facilities. But there still remain strong arguments for using a dedicated physical device. A hardware monitor controller can accommodate additional input sources and speaker outputs, without sacrificing interface I/O or even requiring you to boot up your computer. It can put dedicated controls for your most-used functions within arm’s reach. Importantly, it puts a hardware volume control between your interface and speakers too, and could potentially save your equipment or ears in the event of unexpected level jumps or full-scale noise caused by a computer or interface crash. There’s no shortage of monitor controllers available now, and they come in various shapes and sizes. Some are API MC531
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passive, others use active electronics, and they range from simple stereo volume controls, through desktop devices with more features, up to very sophisticated rackmount units with remote controls that handle large amounts of I/O and incorporate cue-mixing and talkback facilities. If you want to learn more about monitor controllers in general, and why certain facilities might or might not be useful to you, check out Hugh Robjohns’ October 2021 article (https://sosm.ag/ monitor-controllers). This month, we’ll shine the SOS Spotlight on a selection of desktop monitor controllers intended for those working in stereo.
three stereo line-level outputs along with a mono output designed for feeding a subwoofer (all with independent level trims) and an output for driving an external meter, as well as a pair of independent headphone amps that can either mirror the control room signal or receive any of the five inputs. Along with level control, the MC531 offers mono, dim and mute (left, right and overall) functions, and also features a built-in talkback mic. £ £2495 including VAT. W https://apiaudio.com
API MC531
Designed to bring fully featured monitor control to DAW users, API’s MC531 is a standalone version of the centre section of their renowned analogue consoles. Three stereo line-level inputs are joined by a switchable USB/AES3 digital input, while mobile devices are catered for by front- and rear-panel mini-jack inputs and Bluetooth connectivity. You get
Audient Nero
Audient Nero
Another manufacturer bringing their console expertise to the standalone controller world are Audient. The Nero combines a pair of line-level inputs with a dedicated cue input and an alt source that will accept either unbalanced line-level (via RCA or mini-jack) or digital (coaxial or optical S/PDIF) signals. There’s also a built-in talkback mic, as well as the option of connecting an external one. Three pairs of speaker outputs are joined by a mono subwoofer out, and there are four headphone outputs that each benefit from their
own top-panel level controls and source selection switches. The main level control utilises Audient’s Precision Matched Attenuation Technology to ensure perfectly matched volume in the left and right channels, and as well as dim, mute and mono buttons, the Nero includes a polarity switch, making it possible to audition the stereo difference (Sides) signal. Different monitoring configurations can be saved using a Smart Touchpoints system, which offers some handy features such as permanently setting an output to mono without preventing the mono switch from working on other sources. £ £375 including VAT. W https://sosm.ag/audient-nero W https://audient.com
an unbalanced input on both mini-jack and RCA connectors, along with three stereo outputs, a subwoofer out and two headphone amps. All of the monitor outputs benefit from individual level trims, and there’s a built-in talkback mic that can be routed elsewhere, thanks to a rear-panel output. As for monitoring checks, the MC2.1 offers left, right and overall mutes along with dim, polarity and mono functions. Lastly, the MC3.1 expands connectivity even further with an AES (or S/PDIF) digital input and external talkback connectivity, as well as introducing a Cue section that can route any input to either headphone amp independently of the main output. A greater selection of monitoring checks are present, too, with low-, mid- and high-band solos joined by a left/right swap function. £ C MC2 £300, CMC3 £582, MC2.1 £543, MC3.1 £849. Prices include VAT. W https://sosm.ag/drawmer-cmc2 W https://sosm.ag/drawmer-mc2-1 W www.drawmer.com
Hayakumo Izarai Drawmer MC3.1
Drawmer CMC & MC Series
Of the seven monitor controllers in Drawmer’s range, you’ll find four desktop models aimed at stereo setups. The smallest, the CMC2, has a pair of balanced stereo inputs and an unbalanced mini-jack input, along with support for two pairs of speakers, a dedicated mono subwoofer output and a built-in headphone amp. Its larger sibling, the CMC3, adds a third stereo output and a second headphone amp, along with a digital S/PDIF input and both internal and external talkback options. Both are kitted out with mute, dim, mono and polarity switches, and the CMC3 adds individual left/right mutes, and the ability to store and recall a listening level. Next up is the MC2.1, which features two balanced stereo inputs along with Drawmer MC2.1
The Hayakumo Izarai is a compact controller that features a simple, passive design and employs high-quality Japanese-made components. Rather than a potentiometer, the unit uses a 23-step rotary switch for level-control duties, allowing it to offer Hayakumo Izarai adjustment in fixed steps (2dB increments in the most-used range, and 5 or 10 dB steps at the upper and lower zones), as well as guaranteeing accurate stereo tracking. A pair of stereo inputs are joined by three stereo outputs, one of which can be switched in and out independently — a handy function to have when using the output to connect a subwoofer — and a thru output for feeding an external meter. You also get mono and mute functions, as well
as a dim switch that can be set to apply either 10 or 20 dB of attenuation. £ $530 W https://sosm.ag/hayakumo-izarai W https://en.hayakumo.tokyo
Heritage Audio RAM 1000
Heritage Audio RAM Series
As well as their large rackmount System 5000, Heritage Audio’s range of monitor controllers includes a trio of desktop units that cater for a variety of needs and budgets. First up is the Baby RAM, a compact passive unit equipped with a pair of stereo inputs and outputs, a 24-step rotary switch that offers level adjustment in 3dB steps, and a trio of buttons that provide mono, mute and dim functions. The larger RAM 1000 adds a headphone amp, an input level meter and a third stereo input that offers convenient Bluetooth connectivity. Stepping things up a gear, the RAM System 2000 features a trio of analogue inputs and outputs along with subwoofer and mix outputs, and includes both S/PDIF and Bluetooth inputs. There’s also a second headphone amp and additional stereo I/O connections for routing cue mixes to artists, along with a built-in talkback mic with three routing options. A 64-step switch offers volume adjustment in 1dB increments, and it’s possible to store and recall two preset listening levels. £ Baby RAM £168, RAM 1000 £483, RAM
System 2000 £739. Prices include VAT.
W https://sosm.ag/heritage-ram1000 W https://heritageaudio.com
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TECHNIQUE
Pro Tools
We get reacquainted with some of Pro Tools’ stock plug-ins. JULIAN RODGERS
I
f you install all the plug‑ins which come with Pro Tools you’ll be greeted with a generous array of processing options — tools that are often overshadowed by the allure of third-party alternatives. Yet, hidden among these are some real gems that can be just as effective, whether you’re new to the DAW or a seasoned professional. In this article, we’ll explore some of these overlooked plug‑ins and share practical tips. The exact set of plug-ins you have access to depends on which Pro Tools tier you’re using — whether it’s Intro, Artist, Studio, or Ultimate. Some premium Avid plug-ins require you to be ‘on plan’ with a subscription or support plan, but even without it, the stock plug-in library is substantial. There are also some third‑party plug-ins that come as part of Avid’s Inner Circle scheme, which adds value over time for on‑plan customers. But the total available to a new user is significantly boosted by legacy plug-ins, some of which have been around a really long time. Although they are ‘legacy’, Avid ensure that they’re kept up to date so that users can open older sessions without issues. You might be surprised at how well these older plug-ins still hold up. Also, nearly all Avid plug-ins are available in AAX DSP versions — an increasingly rare feature. If you haven’t checked out the stock plug-ins as thoroughly as you might have, or if you’ve never even installed
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The venerable EQ III has a neat feature whereby you all of them, there’s probably a reason for can temporarily turn any band into a band-pass filter, allowing you to home in on your desired frequency. that. Maybe you have a subscription with a third‑party plug-in brand that already and then sweeping it. If you’re cutting and provides you with more plug-ins you can you want to double-check you’ve got the shake a stick at? Whatever the reason, let’s right frequency, Shift‑clicking the control get into some specific examples which point will invert the gain to a boost (or vice might encourage you to look again at these plug-ins. Switch on the preference versa). Get these under your fingers and to display plug-ins by manufacturer as you’ll really get the value of EQ III. well as by type, and have a browse under Moving onto compressors, the 1176 is ‘Avid’ to see what’s already installed. one of the best known, and is of course much imitated. BF76 holds its own EQ & Compression against premium offerings, in spite of the ancient UI with its less than smooth meter. I have to mention the stock EQ III 7-Band. Dialling in some moderate compression There are third‑party alternatives that offer on a drum room mic, I was able to get more features and flexibility, but as a utility a sound which, while not identical, was equaliser, EQ III is a solid choice. If you very close to a premium alternative. There don’t yet know about the band‑pass were differences, but in a blind test I’m not feature in EQ III, try holding Control+Shift sure I’d have chosen the premium plug-in on a Mac or Start+Shift on Windows and as better. Under extreme settings the BF76 grabbing a control point on the curve or was nastier (in a good way), and given that the frequency aggressive sounds are often the intention knob. This gives when breaking out an 1176, it might be your a momentary preferred choice. To test it out set up your band‑pass favourite 1176 emulation against BF76, set behaviour, up one in slot A-E and the other in slot F-J, allowing you match by ear and A/B between them using to quickly find Shift+2/3. the offending frequency Going Gritty without resorting to setting up I’m not alone in really rating the Lo-Fi a narrow boost plug-in. The secret as far as I’m concerned is to ignore all the controls apart from BF76 might be Distortion, and only use tiny amounts of old, but it still holds that. Dial in some Distortion on a DI bass its own against guitar. Use a setting under 1 and follow it modern third-party with a Trim plug-in to match the apparent 1176 emulations.
levels. You’ll hear a nice saturation effect that works really well on transient-rich material like drums if you take care not to go too far; it can really warm up a bass guitar, too. If I’m looking to put some subtle fur onto a sound rather than introducing a more audible ‘trash’, I’ll sometimes use the stock SansAmp PSA-1.
Pitch II A great way to thicken or widen sounds is to use a detune effect, much like one would when detuning oscillators against each other in an analogue synth. Rather than using modulated delays to achieve this effect, try a static pitch‑shift of a few cents in each channel of a stereo or a mono-to-stereo Pitch II plug-in. Instantiate a mono‑to-stereo Pitch II on a mono guitar track and tune down by up to five cents on one side and up by a few cents on the other. Mix to taste using the Mix sliders for some thickening and width. The beating caused by the detuning will change its speed depending on the settings, and if you want to try creating a more complex effect, stack multiple Pitch II plug-ins, with the Mix controls adjusted to blend the effect.
Reverb & Delay Don’t write off the humble D-Verb. It’s been used on more big-selling records than most of us realise. However, you do need to be aware of something important about it: the way it modulates pitch. Set up a D-Verb as an insert on a simple sustaining part played on a pitched
instrument — a piano is ideal. Or, if you prefer, just set up a Signal Generator playing a tone (something not too piercing is recommended!). I used a square wave playing at 100Hz. Now listen to how the Hall algorithm affects the pitch: it modulates up and down in a clearly cyclical way like a slow vibrato. Now listen to Church. It’s a much wider modulation. Next listen to Plate... you’ll hear it’s now modulating in this rather obvious and rather out‑of‑tune way. Keep this in mind when choosing which algorithm to use with pitched sources. While the Avid Mod Delay is a flexible delay plug-in, if you’re looking for something a little more characterful, don’t forget the Tape Echo and BBD Delay plug-ins. These feature the distinctive bottom panel of dark grey buttons and knobs, which reveal their roots in the plug-ins originally developed for the Eleven Rack guitar interface. These plug-ins all respond to MIDI control in a way most AAX audio plug-ins do not, and so can be controlled from a standard MIDI controller. If you don’t have a dedicated control surface and want to play your delays in real time for dubby delay throws that would be difficult to perform using a mouse, instantiate the Tape Delay on an aux, create a MIDI track, assign the output to the plug-in and use MIDI Learn to assign controls to parameters by right‑clicking the parameter and moving the encoder.
AIR Stereo Width
D-Verb can be very effective, but it does apply varying degrees of pitch modulation depending on which algorithm you’ve selected.
Unlike most AAX plug-ins, Tape Delay can be controlled using MIDI — great for dub delay throws!
mono. To toggle to stereo just bypass it. This feels the wrong way round to me but it’s easy enough to control without having to open the plug-in UI. Just remember to Command‑click the plug-in to toggle its bypass state. Blue for bypassed equals stereo. If you don’t have all the stock plug-ins installed, then it’s worth knowing that since Pro Tools 2024.3 you no longer need to restart Pro Tools to use newly installed plug-ins. For all plug-ins other than ARA ones, Pro Tools should find them while it is running. My experience is that some third‑party plug-ins don’t do this, but if you want to try any of the tips listed here and don’t have the necessary plug-ins installed, head over to your Avid account and download them. You can try them even if you have Pro Tools open right now. So why not dive back into your Pro Tools plug-in library? Whether you’re a newcomer or a seasoned user, there’s plenty to explore in the stock plug-ins. You might discover that the tools you already have are more powerful than you think.
While I don’t use most of the audio plug-ins in the AIR Effects Bundle, there is an exception. AIR Stereo Width can be used as a workaround for a feature that otherwise is missing from Pro Tools: the ability to quickly mono check stereo material. To do this, instantiate a Stereo Width plug-in on a stereo track. Use the first mode, Adjust, and set the Width all the way counterclockwise to 0 percent. Now with the plug-in active By dialling the Width right down, the AIR Stereo Width you are summing to plug-in can be used as a simple mono-sum button.
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