I dont really use a ton of them because they use a lot of dsp which you get a limited amount of.Īs a result I mainly save them for bus processing/mastering. I prefer to use the Plugin Alliance stuff over most UAD plugins nowadays, with really only the Fairchild 670 (when I don't use SPL Iron) and the LA-2A as mainstays for me.
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What I'll say is they've very intentionally given away the decent models for free with the interfaces, and the ones that are truly accurate cost an arm and a leg. That said, I probably only use the 1073 and Avalon 737sp in Unison, everything else I feel like imparts the flavor of the preamp onto an already recorded track fairly well. The Unison stuff is super cool, and I like the impedance matching so that your mic will sound comparable to what it would sound like with the hardware. The Pultec EQP-1A is a classic and definitely good for top end boosts and the classic "pultec trick" with kicks and subs. The Chandler Curve Bender and Manley Massive Passive are great options for a mixbus/master bus. If you see a sale on the fairchild ones, or get a voucher for a free/discounted plugin with your purchase, I'd steer you in that direction.ĮQ-wise I'd say there's nothing that particularly stands out to me. Not particularly a fan of the 1176, it works fine, but I'd rather use a distressor model or something else that's as fast over an 1176.ĭepending on what bundle they gave you along with your Apollo, (guessing it's the analog classics one) you'll only have the LA-2A and 1176. The LA-2A is fine, some people really hate it because it's not as uniform as the hardware units, but I'm a big fan of it, pretty much lives in my vocal chains. In any case, I have been asking for this for a couple of years now, so I won't hold my breath.To me, the Fairchild 670 & 660 are some of the most faithful and easy to use vari-mu style compressors available. I would even be happy to pay for such a bundle, although I think that given their generic vanilla functionality, they should come as standard with the hardware. For tracking the dsp count is critical, and it would be very useful to have a nice set of utility plugins to deal with the meat and potatoes jobs, while conserving dsp for the sexy stuff. For example, If I want to put just a high pass filter across say all 16 channels of an Apollo 16, than the precision EQ would use upwards of 60-80% worth of one dsp, depending on sample rate. What I crave though, is the ability to have a low cpu plugin ( <1% ) for each individual function, without the associated overhead of the unwanted features. Make yourself some presets to have the filters already set.Yes, I certainly get that, and at the moment that's what I have to use. The new precision channel strip has your filters and gain adjust. Please UA provide a PRECISION GATE plugin.
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I think it could be done like some unison plugins have more latency and can be combined with less plugin instances maintaining the low latency performance. Lookahead could be tricky as Apollo realtime performance is fast. I would love to see a "PRECISION GATE" plugin with clean and accurate performance, adjustable attack time (fast please!), hold time, release time, sidechain from other channels, lookahead and threshhold of course. UA offers DSP consuming vintage channel strips with "special gate behaviour" which might not be perfect for everything. Lots of DSP waste (gating 10 channels: 6x toms, kick, snare top&buttom, hi-hat). Ended up using API channel strip just for the gate. SSL gate is basically fine but not the fastest to preserve attack/transients. UA support could not help so it seems to be normal behaviour. Neve 88rs gate doesn't work for me at all because it stutters awfully on low freq signals (kick).
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I use Apollo for drum tracking & recording.