With many years experience working as recording engineers and producers, our review team of George Shilling and Russell Cottier know the good from the bad. In many cases it's a matter of taste, some prefer one EQ over another but we try to provide unbiased and objective reviews of the equipment tested.
Sonuscore Chroma Upright Piano
The story from Sonuscore is that a team was sampling a high quality grand piano, but were drawn to an “unassuming upright” in the same studio. So having completed the initial job, decided they should comprehensively sample it.
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Teaching Machines Wellspring
Before digital delay and reverb became commonplace in the early 1980s, reverb on records was created by analogue means.
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Sonuscore The Score
Sonuscore have been producing sample libraries for 12 years. NI Komplete owners may be familiar with their Action Strings instrument, cleverly generating moving string parts with preset phrases.
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ifi ZEN One Studio
ifi have been designing hifi products in Britain for over 20 years. I first came across the brand several years ago when I was alerted to the importance of using a good quality phono preamp to boost turntable cartridge gain and implement the required RIAA...
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Baby Audio Atoms
Following on from their retro-inspired BA-1 synth plugin, Baby Audio sends me into some other worlds with their new Atoms plugin. The first of Baby Audio’s virtual instruments was a fun re-creation of a mini vintage synth.
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Audio Ease Altiverb 8
It has been some years since I reviewed a new version of Altiverb. Audio Ease have however continued during all this time to quietly add new impulse responses. And these are available free to users of this grandaddy of convolution reverbs.
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Baby Audio Transit
Baby Audio are relatively new kids on the block, making some innovative and very groovy plugins that a number of influential producers have adopted and lauded.
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Accentize dxRevive
dxRevive is a speech restoration plugin, designed to correct audio problems such as background noise, clipping, overly-reverby recordings. It can also restore missing frequencies using AI. Although designed for dialogue restoration, we thought we would have a look at uses for this in music.
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Kalide Collage
Collage is a “modular effects system” bundled up as a single plugin. Its processor modules include all kinds of effects like modulation, dynamics, EQ, filters, reverb, delays, distortion, panning and width controls and more. But that doesn’t really tell the whole story.
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Eiosis e2deesser
Eiosis was the brainchild of renowned plugin designer Fabrice Gabriel, who set up the company before teaming up with Steven Slate to co-found Slate Digital.
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Distortion In Music Production: The Soul Of Sonics
So it is with a slight scepticism that I come to education and training. While good practice and studio techniques are something to teach and learn, some of what makes great records is not necessarily teachable.
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Electrodyne Summing Station
Electrodyne has been in operation in several different incarnations over the past half century. In the late 1940s and early 1950s they manufactured valve broadcast gear. In the 1960s Electrodyne made consoles under the Quad-Eight brand.
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PSP FETpressor
Polish plug-in designer PSP has been producing hardware inspired plug-ins for nearly 15 years. The plug-in solutions tend to be tools in their own right with a generic analogue feel to them, but not specific emulations.
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Warm Audio WA73-EQ
Warm Audio was founded in 2011 by Bryce Young and has come a long way, now offering accessible incarnations of classic studio pieces at reasonable prices. What’s more, you won’t have to expect huge repair costs with these all new ‘vintage’ racks.
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AMS Neve BCM10/2 MK2
Neve have been building high-end characterful consoles for decades, the BCM10 being one such desk.
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Eventide Tony Visconti Tverb
Berlin, 1977, in Hansa Tonstudio: Tony Visconti is recording Bowie's soon-to-be hit song Heroes, but he has run out of tracks. Hansa's studio 2 was the historic Meistersaal Hall constructed in 1910 for classical music performance.
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