How does this sound to you… a set of totally awesome FREE plug-ins (that is, with an unlimited demo period), and if you want to have settings that are savable, automation and bypass mode you can buy each program for between $69 and $89? Sound amazing? Well, that’s the deal with Massey Plug-ins (www.masseyplugins.com). The idea behind Steven Massey’s company is that you’ll use his plug-ins and love them so much that eventually you’ll want to buy them (dirt cheap, for what you get) to get the full functionality. That’s exactly what happened to me with the L2007 Mastering Limiter.
I’m not a mastering engineer, but I do at times master tracks for people. Even when I’m putting together a mix I always try to throw a compressor/limiter combination on the Master output so that I have a sense of what it will sound like after it’s been mastered. The idea is that once a song or album is mixed you bring it to a mastering engineer to have him or her put the finishing touches on it. They try to get a good EQ balance that stays consistent from song to song, and they compress and/or limit the stereo track to make it competitively loud against other records out there.
The second part of that process, the making-it-louder part, is where a mastering limiter comes into play. I have messed around with many buss compressors/limiters and the L2007 is amazing. It has four different modes (Loud, Mellow, Smooth and Vibrant) that determine which algorithm the L2007 uses and how it goes about compressing the signal. Each one has its own vibe and it’s easy to find one that suits the material you’re working with. Likewise, the release function determines how quickly it recovers from hitting the threshold and each time setting (Normal, Fast, Medium and Slow) affects the overall “glueyness” of the track. Obviously, the Threshold sets the level at which it starts going to work on the track and the Max Output determines the hotness of the final output.
The L2007 is easy to use and it gives you top-notch results. Every engineer I know uses some sort of buss compression and everyone loves the L2007. I’ve had the L2007 for a while and used it for free, but the last track I was mastering I ended up needing to automate the Threshold. The track got a lot louder at the end and one consistent setting made the end part sound over-compressed. So, I dropped the $89 and I felt great about it – I love the program, I use it all the time and it didn’t break the bank.
I’ve tried other Massey Plug-ins and they are great. Check them all out at www.masseyplugins.com.
Cabinet is the latest piece of software from Audio Ease, the company that brought you the highly regarded convolution reverb plug in Altiverb and Speakerphone. Cabinet (which costs only $60) is actually a basic version of Speakerphone and is geared specifically toward guitarists and bassists. This software is a set of five famous speaker cabinets captured using convolution technology for you to run your guitar or bass through.
If you don’t know about convolution and how it works, here are two wiki pages going through the basics: Convolution – Convolution Reverb
We finally managed to put our hands on a TC Polytune – people at the Winter NAMM show back in January were pretty excited about this little white box. What makes this tuner truly revolutionary is the fact that it is poly-chromatic, providing the ability to tune all strings concurrently: Strum all six strings open and the display shows which individual strings are sharp, flat, and on pitch. And yes, it works for bass guitars, too!
Our initial impression was extremely positive — the polytune does a good job of tuning in a manner that has never been accomplished before, provided you stick to standard tunings. It can also tune strings individually the “old fashioned” way, and you need to use this traditional method of tuning when dealing with alternate and/or dropped tunings, or guitars with seven or eight strings.
The polytune is just as easy to use as any other tuner pedal available. It was easy for us to make full use of its capabilities whether tuning in poly-chromatic or chromatic modes. We tested with a variety of six-string electric guitars and a five-string bass. There’s not much we can really say about the polytune other than this: the revolutionary product worked as advertised! Read the full review here.
V-Moda is a Hollywood-based lifestyle brand that mixes fashion, design and music to make some beautiful products. The Crossfade LP headphones are their latest addition to their product lineup.
Four years in the making, the Crossfade LP is the marriage of design and functionality. V-Moda founder Val Kolton collaborated with musicians and DJ’s from around the world to develop headphones with a balanced, warm, functional sound. And Kolton’s passion for Italian design shows in the Crossfade LP, which looks like the Ferrari of headphones. They definitely score high marks in the bling-factor category.
As far as sound goes, these headphones have great isolation from outside noise – the closed-back design and the memory foam ear cushions see to that. The Crossfade has a warm, punchy low end response with a slightly softer high end, which helps combat fatiguing high frequencies in loud and/or long listening sessions. As its name might suggest, the Crossfade LP is a great choice for DJ’s who are exposed to exactly that – long and loud listening sessions where they need punchy (not squishy) bass frequencies and a slightly reigned-in high end. Another great feature (again, especially for long sessions) is the super-comfortable fit. When I put them on I didn’t want to take them off!
The Crossfade LP headphones come with a cool exoskeleton molded case, two fabric cables (one with a 3-button control and microphone for use with phones and external devices) and a ¼” adapter. For more info visit www.v-moda.com.
It is really amazing what audio plug ins manufacturers are doing these days to recreate the original sound of acoustic instruments (for a fun article about this, see “The Invasion of the Sound Snatchers” here). Vir2’s Violence is the latest attempt to emulate the sound of a (real) violin through multi-sampling – with some added extras. Even though my personal belief is that no plug in can get even close to the sound a fantastic performer can deliver, this kind of software is extremely useful when what is needed is a quick and great sounding way to add a part to an arrangement – something that sounds realistic enough to be kept in the final mix. Violence also shows promise as a creative tool for original sound design for musicians that are not necessarily interested in a realistic tone.
The inspiration for Violence came from the influential American composer John Cage, whose extensive experiments with prepared piano yielded new timbres and effects. According to Vir2, what Cage did on the piano, Violence brings to the violin: an unorthodox approach to a traditional instrument, yielding new textures and sound design elements. Violence combines physical alterations with digital manipulations for a sound that straddles acoustic and electronic realms.
All the possible sounds this instrument can create were “deconstructed” by recording them from numerous angles: bowed, scraped, hit, plucked, played with mallets, chopsticks, guitar picks, and wet fingers. These sounds were then programmed and layered to create four categories of sounds: Drum Kits, Melodic, Pads and Sound Effects, and Tempo-Synced.
Violence is powered by the Kontakt engine. It is compatible with VST, AudioUnit, and RTAS (Pro Tools 7 & plug-in formats allowing it to work seamlessly within any major sequencer, in addition to standalone use.
The Maxon OD-820’s color—vibrant pea green—announces right off the bat that this pedal is from the same neighborhood as the classic Tube Screamer. But the DNA runs even deeper than that. Maxon pedals come from the same factory that made the original Tube Screamers, which Maxon sometimes built for Ibanez.
So why not just buy a reissued Tube Screamer? Because the OD-820, which costs a whopping $217.50, is more… evolved. Even the chassis is re-imagined, housed in a larger body size that apparently prevents unwanted hums and clicks by giving the components more breathing room.
This pedal has another couple trick up its sleeve, too. Rather than distort the incoming signal, it blends the unprocessed guitar signal with the pedal’s distortion. Turn the blend pot, which is labeled “gain,” right down and you can use the OD-820 as a volume boost.
So how does it sound? Designed to push a tube amp, the distortion is warm and builds up fast. Go anywhere between nine and twelve o’clock, and you’re in exhilarating classic-rock territory. Any more than that and the blended-in clean signal that keeps the overdriven tone so musical starts to get lost in the mix, but if you’re looking for heat, the OD-820 has plenty to spare.
The test OD-820 does have a couple of annoying issues—after being put through its paces at a number of live gigs, the level pot is slightly scratchy and the knobs sometimes come loose and need to be screwed back in with a tiny Allen key. The sound it produces, though, transcends these niggling points. A little goosing by the OD-820, even on relatively clean tones, adds just a smidgen of underlying grit that just makes you want to keep playing. Crank up the gain to 10 o’clock, and you’re in vintage heaven. – Howard Stock
Octant can be described as a one-man band featuring mainly acoustic robotic musical instruments that back up front man, Matthew Steinke, like a player piano as he sings, shouts, and plays various home brew instrumentation. For the upcoming performance at The Tank (NYC), Octant will perform an initial set of current and old songs ranging from dark melodic melancholy to bursting atomic pop-punk . The second part will include a live soundtrack to a projection of Steinke’s film, “Your Quest for Excellence” , a hypnotic abstract hand-drawn animation inspired by optical illusions and time lapse photography. – (as posted in The Deli’s Open Blog – post your band’s entries, videos, and Mp3s here).
You know how sometimes your amp simulation plugin doesn’t really sound like your awesome tube amp? Even though a lot of software can be pretty cool with options and built-in effects, they sometimes don’t quite get the job done. And then you end up recording your real amp anyway. That happens to me all the time. I think amp modeling has come a long way in the last few years, but there’s still something about tube emulation that hasn’t really quite cut it – until now.
Wave Arts just put out a really great tube amp emulator called Tube Saturator ($99.95) that actually cuts the mustard. How did they do it? Without getting crazy technical I’ll just say that they meticulously modeled every nuance of an analog circuit using complicated mathematical equations that are solved on the fly – that is, in real time. The result is a very convincing tube amp sound.
Here’s the downside (or the upside, depending on how you look at it) – it’s very simple. It doesn’t model fifty different amps, it only does one model of tube amp and it does it very well. That’s partly because it’s pretty CPU-intensive. Also because of its heavy processing, it is only a tube amp emulator – there is no cabinet and mic emulation happening in this software. But I actually used it with Cabinet from Audio Ease (only $60), which only does the cabinet and mic part of the job, and it was a knockout combination.
So, it’s not a Swiss Army knife, but it does what it does extremely well. To me, that’s even better than having a million less-than-amazing options, and when you consider the price ($99.95) it’s really fantastic. This is the best software emulation of an analog tube amp that I’ve ever heard – it has great warmth and true-to-life tube growl if you push it. The controls are simple – there’s control over drive, output, a unique Baxandall 3-band EQ, and a “Fat” switch that changes the emulation to a thicker, punchier sound.
Check out www.wavearts.com for more info. Although, I should warn you that the sound examples on the site don’t reflect what Tube Saturator sounds like coupled with a good speaker cabinet software. I highly recommend demo’ing it along with Cabinet from Audio Ease, which is a great convolution cabinet software. You can check out Cabinet at www.audioease.com. Try the free demo of both and use them together – you won’t be disappointed!
Hank and Cupcakes are a NYC duo that plays sweaty and groovy indie pop. If Cupcakes (the girl) provides driven drumming and soulful vocals, Hank’s bass is in charge of everything else – a role that the 4 string instrument rarely takes upon itself. You wouldn’t call Hank’s style “minimalistic”: the man can deliver at once melodic riffs and low frequency lines, mastering left hand dexterity, right hand picking authority, and huge array of filters, flangers and followers to make one of the freshest signature sounds I’ve heard in the bass world. Some bassists will use distortion and call it a signature sound, occasionally turning on a filter for a specific part of a song… Hank seems to dive into filter mode head first for nearly all of his playing, and serve up different shades of filtering – read Benjamin Wigler q&a with Hank here.
My first awareness of looping pedals happened at a rock show back in the ‘90’s. The acclaimed band Don Caballero, an instrumental math rock tour-de-force, had released a new album after losing their second guitarist. Curiosity was high among the indie dweebs pushing to the front at this, their first show as a three piece: how would they pull it all off live with just one guitar?
The answer came in the form of not one but two Akai Headrush loop pedals employed by guitarist Ian Williams during the set. At times, the crowd was treated to what sounded like a wall of guitarists thanks to Williams’ pedal arsenal.
Other pedals with similar features were already on the scene, but the Headrush had the advantage of simplicity: two switches, an in an out loop option, and 4 outs to simulate tape head echoes. My own musical endeavors had me go through two Headrush pedals in little over a few years. A fantastic little box with two major issues: a weak footswitch assembly and an easily destroyed power supply input.
While it does not sport the silver tank look of its predecessor, the Akai Headrush E2 updates these weaknesses and adds an even better switching mechanism for its three main functions: delay, echo and, of course, looping. The pedal also ups its total looping time to 35 seconds – not as impressive perhaps as other model pedals on the market but plenty of time to get your loop on.
Though many loop pedals have come along since that landmark Don Cab show, the Akai Headrush remains the simplest, most durable way to achieve outstanding 16bit quality live sound-on-sound looping in a compact, tough unit. - Greg Hoy
plug-in formats allowing it to work seamlessly within any major sequencer, in addition to standalone use.
The 
