I’ve been a believer in adding saturation in the DAW via special plugins ever since becoming acquainted with the idea via Charles Dye’s Mix It Like A Record interactive video mixing course.
As I learned there, I’ve been using McDSP’s Analog Channel, several of the DUY plugins (including DaD Valve, DaD Tape, etc.), Steven Massey’s TapeHead plugin and the Waves SSL bundle to achieve this.
Now there’s a new player in this interesting niche, Slate Digital. (You might be familiar with Steven Slate from his famous drum sample collections and drum replacement products.)
Here’s the official lowdown from the company, and in the latter half, Steven Slate himself:
The Slate Digital “Virtual Console Collection” brings the sound of six of the most legendary mixing consoles in to your digital audio workstation.
“When you mix through an analog desk you get this life and body to the sound that just doesn’t happen when you mix inside the workstation. The separation and imaging from the analog summing is very apparent, especially when your track count gets high” remarks mixer Jay Baumgardner (Papa Roach, Evanescence).
Steven Slate made his mark on analog summing by conceiving the concept of the Folcrom passive summing, which was expertly designed and manufactured by Roll Music in 2001. Now he brings analog summing to the digital world.
“Slate Digital CTO Fabrice Gabriel and I studied these consoles inside and out. We meticulously modeled the entire circuit path so that we could recreate every subtle nuance that makes these consoles the legends that they are”.
The VIRTUAL CONSOLE COLLECTION consists of two plugins, Virtual Channel and Virtual Mixbuss. Each plugin allows the user to choose from one of six modeled consoles. Virtual Channel is applied on individual mixing channels. Virtual Mixbuss goes on the first insert of the master fader.
When using the Virtual Console Collection, your DAW instantly takes on the personality of a real analog mixing desk. The imaging and depth improves, instruments sit better in the frequency spectrum, and mixing becomes easier and more musical. You can even push the DAW faders up to find each mixer’s ’sweet spot’. This is due to the algorithms being dynamic, just like a real console.
From Slate Digital Co-founder Steven Slate:
The Virtual Console Collection has been a dream of mine for years. I’ve always mixed on analog consoles because I love the color and sound that they provide, and I missed it while trying to mix “in the box”.
The Folcrom allowed me to get the best of both worlds, and I’ve used it on hundreds of mixes and productions with great results. However, after creating Slate Digital with Fabrice Gabriel almost two years ago, one of the first things we looked into was recreating the sound of analog mixing, but with digital.
This first lead us to the question: What is wrong with digital summing?
To answer this question, we first built our own digital summing buss. In fact we built three of them. Our conclusion?
NOTHING. Nothing at all is “wrong” about digital summing, whether it be fixed integer or floating point, dithered or undithered. None of these things had an audible effect that any human could pick out in a blind A/B test.
No, actually the problem is with analog summing. With an analog console, the audio path contains a lot of circuitry. By the time a mix is summed in an analog console and gets passed to the outputs, it contains varied degrees of harmonic distortion, phase distortion, and noise. However, it is these nonlinearities that sound “musical” to the human ear.
Fabrice Gabriel is not only a genius at audio DSP, but he has a degree in electrical engineering. He was able to carefully analyze the schematics of all the great mixing consoles and produce individual DSP modules that reproduce various parts of the circuit path, from line input amplifiers to fader buffers to summing amps. Over the past year, we then tweaked the modules by EAR in a mastering room to precisely match the hundreds of test files that were processed with each console.
Keep in mind, that an analog console is a dynamic instrument. As you begin to push the faders into the mix buss, the amplifiers start to reach their threshold and various changes occur in the harmonics and overall sound. This is all recreated in this plugin suite.
In conclusion, I’m so proud of this plugin, and I think it will change the way many people think of “mixing in the box”. As we’ve been developing the Virtual Console Collection, we’ve been pleased to see other digital models of analog mixing pop up (such as the Harrison Mixbuss), showing us that this was an important issue for the audio industry, and we’re glad to add to it.
The Virtual Console Collection is RTAS, VST, AU on both Mac and PC, and along with the whole Slate Digital line, will now be available very soon with a 14 day demo. I’m eager for you all to try them.
