Recording - February 2012 - 64

PLUG-IN OUTLET
U670 According to the manufacturer, this plug-in is one of the results of a long working session with a Fairchild 670 compressor. These beasts are impossible to find for anything less than the price of a nice car, and probably unattainable even if you have the cash to spend. So having a quality emulation available is about as good as we are going to get! In addition to smoothing the transients, this compressor model provides a subtle “warmth” across a track—and generally in an appropriate way. I had no trouble finding a place for it in both aggressive mixes and New Age-y tracks I was working on, and it turned out really nicely with a singer/songwriter that was looking for an old-school, Leonard Cohen-style productions. This is an interesting model, and deserves its position at the top of the list; it seems to do good things to the audio that it touches, and definitely sets the stage for things to come. Moo Tube One of the odd entries, the Moo Tube is a tube compressor emulation with an indescribable “goodness” factor that I really liked. The three controls (labeled Threshold, Attack and Recovery) are similar to the Threshold, Attack and Release that you might expect, but when combined with the Moo Tube’s modeling characteristics, it provided a very interesting and surprising alteration of the sound. The lack of a ratio control is an indicator that something different is going on here; in an attempt to model something along the lines of a Manley Variable-Mu compressor, the compression ratio and output gain are constantly shifting based on the source material and amount of compression.

The Opto-C compressor fit me like an old shoe, since I’d had the chance (long ago...) to work with a well-known vintage opto-comp.

I really liked this on both synthesizer and drum tracks, where it helped slot everything together. I thought it was especially effective on repurposed hip-hop drum tracks, where it juiced up the low end while simultaneously tightening up the accessory percussion. It was a little too mid-centric for me to use as a master compressor, but for individual tracks it helped achieve a “vintage” sound that I adored. iComp Perhaps the easiest-to-use compressor in the set, the iComp is possibly one of the most useful. It only has two controls (Thresh and Ratio), which means even recording beginners can wrap their heads around it. But this is the closest thing in the package to a “make it all better” compressor, and is a natural to strap across the master outputs of your tracks. I found this plug-in to work exceptionally well with loop-heavy tracks and across the Master output; mixes that were sourced from Ableton Live really responded well to this one, and a few nudges of the Threshold control generally was all that was required to bring a track home. I found that the Ratio control had a sweet spot (for me) at around 12 o’clock, and I rarely changed that part of the setting.
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RECORDING FEBRUARY 2012

Recording - February 2012

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