Recording - October 2009 - 50

Abbey Road Plug-ins Brilliance Pack By Paul Vnuk Jr. PLUG-IN OUTLET to hear the real thing in person. Judging by the success of the TG Limiter from Abbey Road and Chandler we can guess these latest ones to be darn close also. To my ears they sound great. Abbey Road Studios in the 1960s produced what is arguably some of the greatest recorded music of our time, and most of it was done on then stateof-the-art/custom-built REDD series EMI tube desks. What you probably did not know was that each channel only offered two bands of equalization, with only a high-frequency boost at 5 kHz. In 2009 it’s almost impossible to imagine crafting a mix with only two bands of fixed eq! Luckily the engineers at EMI felt the same way and solved the problem by creating a series of passive external “presence” boxes that would fill in some of the missing frequencies. Luckier still is that Abbey Road’s plug-in division have modeled them as part of their growing line of historic, vintage plug-in recreations. Obscure history reborn In Recording’s October 2008 Plug-in Outlet I reviewed the TG 12413 Limiter package, which I felt “evoked the three-dimensionality and harmonic saturation of a good hardware piece” all while being incredibly CPU efficient. The newest plug-ins reviewed today, released as the Abbey Road Brilliance Pack, are cut from the same cloth and coding. (Unlike the TG 12413 and some other Abbey Road products, the Abbey Road Brilliance Pack is only available from www.abbeyroadplugins.com.) The presence boxes modeled in the Brilliance Pack include three plug-ins in two basic flavors—the RS127 and the simpler RS135. Both units are handy little boxes with an obvious vintage vibe that easily found use on any track that needed to move forward in a mix. Vocals and snare benefit nicely from a boost of 10k on the RS127 or 8k on the RS135. On electric guitar tracks I like pushing 2 to 6 dB of 2.7 or 3.5k. If you need just a touch more punch then the “transformered” RS127 is the way to go. I also have found +2 at 10k to be a nice little mix enhancer on the master buss. 90% of the time in my mixes the RS127 is a boost box for vibe; the only time I use it to cut a frequency is if I need to make room in the 2.7 / 3.5k range when daisychaining two 127s in a row. Like the TG limiter plug-in, these boxes are ultra CPU efficient and you can scatter them liberally throughout your mix, but a word of warning: The Brilliance Pack is like sonic crack, and in a modern world where we often equate “brighter” with “better” you need to be judicious. Final thoughts Aside from being a useful tool in our plug-in cabinet, the Brilliance Pack also indulges our fantasy factor. In other words, you can pretend to be a white-coated amp-room tech or engineer from the heyday of Abbey Road nursing a new song into pop stardom. It is kind of the same as playing a soft-synth Mellotron, or using a plug-in Fairchild emulation. Most of us will never own a real one, but who cares—it’s still fun to pretend! At $249 ($499 TDM) the Brilliance Pack is an aural delicacy. While not as essential as the TG12413 or TG Mastering Pack, the Brilliance Pack is inexpensive enough to be a wonderful guilty pleasure. RS127—both versions—and RS135 The RS127 was a favorite among Abbey Road engineers and in constant use. The RS127 was/is a single channel eq offering up to 10 dB of cut or boost at a choice of 2.7, 3.5 or 10 kHz. The RS127 was originally built as a rackmount device, but became so popular that portable standalone versions were also made. The RS127 saw a ton of use on vocals and guitars, and according to engineer Ken Townsend, “+10 at 10k was one [we] used a lot on drums”. When one of the RS127s is passed through an EMI interfacing transformer to connect it to a modern console, the transThe Ken Townsend quote and additional information was former exaggerates the eq curve. Both versions have been found in the excellent book Recording The Beatles by Brian modeled in the Brilliance Pack, the grey “rack” version being Kehew and Kevin Ryan (ISBN# 0-9785200-0-9, Curvebender the original, and the green “box” version having the “transPublishing, 2006). former effect” included. The third component of the Brilliance Pack is the Delivery: Web download only RS135, which was an in-line 10 dB, 8 kHz booster box, Format:VST, Audio Units, RTAS, Pro Tools TDM; Mac OS X 10.4 or which actually accomplished its goal by attenuating the newer, Windows XP/Vista surrounding frequencies down 10 dB, giving the illusion of an 8k eq boost. Copy Protection: iLok USB key License: single iLok (multiple installs, one active at a time) In use lots of use! Documentation: PDF only Each plug-in is visually identical to its real world counterPrice: $249 VST/AU/RTAS, $499 TDM part. As for sonic accuracy, we will just have to take the More from: Abbey Road Plug-ins, www.abbeyroadplugins.com. word of Abbey Road, as I would guess that less than 0.01% of the world’s engineering population will ever get a chance 50 RECORDING OCTOBER 2009

http://www.abbeyroadplugins.com http://www.abbeyroadplugins.com

Recording - October 2009

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - October 2009