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PLUG-IN OUTLET

Gate: A pretty standard age-old process that cuts out and mutes any audio that falls below a set threshold. Thanks to DAW automation, I have moved away from gating vocals in recent years, often preferring to do it by hand, but I was pleasantly reminded how much of a time saver it can be to “set it and forget it”. Eq: Similar to Basic mode, but in the Advanced editor parameters can also be precisely edited with numeric values. How does it sound? Since clean and accurate eq has long been one of iZotope’s signature achievements, pretty darn good. Saturation: Saturation models the sound of analog tape, tubes, and vintage gear and their harmonic distortions contained within. The saturator works best at lower levels for adding a pinch of girth and fullness, and at full bore it is also cool as an overdriven effect. Compression: Nectar’s compressor runs in one of two modes. The first is as a typical compressor with controls for knee, ratio, attack, release, and gain, but it also includes a wet/dry mix knob for blending the dry signal back in for a process known as parallel compression. Taking this a step further, a second compressor can be engaged, again in parallel to allow two flavors of compression to be blended together. Each compressor offers a choice of vintage, opto, digital, or solid-state emulation, and includes an adjustable sidechain filter as well. Motown compression, here we come! De-Esser: With standard controls for frequency and Ess-reduction, when set correctly it works well to remove vocal sibilance. Limiter: While it looks like a simple brick-wall limiter (with threshold and output settings), according to iZotope, this one contains an intelligent release algorithm that is tailored for vocals. In use Over a 3-month period I put Nectar through its paces on a male Limiters are another tool which iZotope has excelled at in the past; the Ozone mastering limiter is one of my favorites. Having one suited to folk singer, a female R’n’B vocalist, an aggressive indie rock belter, a pop-country hillbilly, a hip-hop rapper and a few voiceover vocals is a nice option indeed. Doubler: The doubler uses pitched formants and delays to give sessions for podcasting and video work. In each instance it the illusion of other voices in a mix. These can be individually worked well. I may have other plug-in or hardware choices that tweaked for time, pitch and level as well as panned when placed might win out in singular side-by-side comparison, but Nectar on a stereo buss. Of the effects in Nectar the doubler easily takes the needs to be taken as a whole. You can scroll through presets cake for me; it is great for subtle shimmery hi-fi chorusing, all the way quickly and find easily tweakable great-sounding results fast. On the creative side, just like auditioning synth presets, I was to demonic alien quartets! Delay: Nectar’s delay is also pretty robust. Along with the usual constantly stumbling onto surprising and drastically varied delay time, feedback and mix parameters it also has low- and high- results that kept me thinking, “Hmmm, how about this one?” cut eq, as well as a choice of emulated Digital, Tape and Analog Usually I am a simple “eq/compressor/touch of delay or verb” guy when it comes to my vocal mixes, and even though I may modes complete with a grit-adding Trash setting for the latter two. Its 3.5 seconds of delay time can be tempo-synced, and it is audition a few different compressors here and there, I usually rounded out with depth and rate controls for your old school end up with the same results. Nectar really helps me to think and chorus and flanging needs. It can even simulate the self-oscilla- color outside the lines more, which is a great thing. Nectar is one powerful plug-in that sounds great, offers a host tion found in old analog and tape delays. Reverb: Last but not least, Nectar contains a reverb algorithm sim- of creative choices for a myriad of mixing instances, and, most ilar to that found in Ozone, with a choice of plates, halls and a of all, it allows you to work quickly yet with truly musical results, cathedral. It has a maximum of 4 seconds of decay time, a graph- which in this business equals dollars! ic display and all the standard controls. It’s not a Lexicon, but when blended back in a mix it does not have to be. Delivery: Web download Formats: RTAS/AudioSuite, VST, Audio Unit, MAS, DirectX Power with a price Requires: Windows XP or later, Mac OS X 10.5 or later (PowerPC or Intel) Nectar is very heavy on CPU load, but considerCopy Protection: Pace iLok hardware key required for full operation; ing everything that is going on under the hood, this is works in Trial Mode without restrictions for 10 days not surprising; with everything turned on, it’s the License: single iLok key, multiple installs equivalent of 11 heavy-hitting plug-ins. I was able to Documentation: PDF download run only two instances on my 5-year-old 17" 2.16 Price: $249 GHz Core 2 Duo Macbook Pro, and my 21/2-yearMore from: iZotope, www.izotope.com. old studio PC fared only slightly better.
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RECORDING MARCH 2011

Also with this power comes latency, especially with the Breath Controller engaged—its very long lookahead requires ten times more buffering than any of the other Nectar effects, a whopping 26,623 samples on average! Even with automatic delay compensation enabled in Cubase, some track finessing was necessary. Nectar offers two solutions: First, the processes in Nectar are additive in their contributions to load and latency, and the Breath Control, Pitch Correction, Limiter and Doubler each contribute a lot. You can turn off what you do not need at the moment and gain back a lot of processor power. Second, Nectar offers a mixing mode as well as a much more CPU-friendly tracking mode. In tracking mode many of the processes are lowered in quality, Breath Control is disabled to allow for lower latency, and the Limiter becomes a standard brick-wall-only version. Use these when you need to audition higher track instances when monitoring live through Nectar.

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Recording - March 2011

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