Plugins can be really exciting!
Often built to look like the the gear of our dreams, there’s a myriad of compressors, saturators, delays and preamps that add grit, heft, weight and depth to our sound sources. However, all of these exciting plugins with beautiful, vintage-inspired and weathered graphic user interfaces are in vain if your audio isn’t in tip top shape!
While it’s also best practice to check things like phase, gain and more while recording, sometimes the project calls for some more in-depth and clinical audio cleanup. For this, saturation doesn’t help, and instead the transparent nature of digital audio can be great for fix up jobs, servicing equipment and installing new bits of kit! You might just find yourself relying on these more than you realise!
Signal generator
Most DAWs will have some kind of signal generator plugin, and it does just what it says on the box. Pro Tools has the aptly named Signal Generator, Logic Pro has Test Oscillator and Cubase has TestGenerator. These plugins can create single frequency sine waves, as well as options for white and pink noise and more!
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This comes in really handy for checking and making connections with hardware, outboard and auxiliary sources like headphones. These plugins send out a simple tone, allowing you to send and receive the consistent tone to make sure it’s arriving wherever you choose to route it. Hardware acting up? Send a tone through it and see what the VUs do, and listen to how the tone sounds on the other end!
Installing a patchbay? Patch a tone around to some gear and make sure it’s arriving where it’s meant to.
While we’re at it—another really handy tool is a cable tester. While it’s good and well to send and receive signal to and from your DAW, a tool like a cable tester can allow you primarily to check cables, but also to send a test tone from the cable tester to make sure it’s arriving where you’re expecting. Being knee deep in patching in a new mixing console myself, using daisy-chained interfaces and ADAT connections to send and receive the audio, my handy cable tester and Pro Tools’ Signal Generator have come in more exciting and useful than the tube powered compressors I have in my Reverb cart.
Phase alignment/corrector
Before we dive into some handy tools for checking and correct phase, let’s demystify some terms that are often (wrongly) used interchangeably: phase and polarity.
In audio, phase refers to the relationship between two signals. In recording and producing, soundwaves push and pull microphone diagrams above a zero point which, at the other end, either pushes (above the zero point) the speaker cone out, or pulls (when the waveform is below the zero point) the speaker cone back to create sound. If two sounds are instructing the microphone and/or speaker to be pushed and pulled at slightly different times, the resulting sound will be a less powerful version of the source, as the speaker microphone (and therefore speaker cone) are being pulled back as it’s being pushed out.
If something is 180° out of phase with something else, the microphone and/or speaker is being instructed to push and pull from the zero point with the same amount of energy. Two identical signals 180° out of phase will result in no sound, as the speaker is being pushed and pulled in exactly opposite direction with equal energy, so the speaker cone won’t move.
Polarity refers to something being set to either 0° or 180° in our out of phase. Phase, however, can be anything between 0° and 180°, and more often than not, this is where you’ll have issues. Most preamps and plugins will have a polarity switch, but if something is less than 180°, you’ll need something to correct phase.
Delay plugins (not like an echo or reverb) can be used to slightly delay a sound so that two sources arrive at the speaker at exactly the same time. Little Labs also make hardware called the IBP, faithfully recreated in a plugin by UAD. Auto-Algin by Sound Radix is an entirely automatic plugin that allows you to phase align a whole heap of sources all at once, live within your DAW. Really well aligned tracks will give a better sense of depth, as well as helping sources to feel more crystallised and real within a stereo field.
Trim
Every DAW will have some kind of Trim plugin, really handy for keeping your gain consistent and healthy across your whole mix. These can be used to ensure proper levels are hitting plugins, or for the analogue lovers amongst us, allow you to set and forget your hardware, using Trim plugins to control how much signal hits the hardware for easier recall.
Trimming signals obviously allows you to pare it back, but you can also push things harder into plugins or hardware, for more saturation, grit and heft that comes with those more exciting, often tube-driven, sounds.
Metering
Metering is incredibly important, and the bouncing green meters of your tracks aren’t always enough to know what’s going on. A handful of metering plugins can keep you confident things are sounding good, and while it’s generally not advisable to mix with your eyes, a little extra help never hurt anyone!
Metering can be for the frequency response of your whole mix, or overall volume levels, different metering plugins showing LUFS, Peak RMS, short term and momentary loudness and more. Use it to reference your favourite mixes and see how they look, as well as sound. iZotope make a great plugin in Insight, and companies like TC Electronic make hardware for dedicated monitoring with their Clarity range. HOFA also produce the 4U Meter, Fader & MS-Pan that has just about every meter you could need!
Room and chamber reverbs
While reverbs can be more exciting than a lot of the plugin we’re talking about here, a few great sound utility reverbs can be really handy to have around, especially in the isolated nature of recording that we often find ourselves in!
Things like plates, spring reverbs and more are fun, but some great room and chamber reverbs can be relied on mix after mix for more subtle effect, i.e. to place a whole band into the same space.
Historically, studios would have a reverb chamber to access reverbs, and one physical space meant anything that needed reverb was sent to the single chamber and returned to the console. While we’ve advanced lightyears from here, there’s a certain sense of cohesion that minimal use of reverbs can give.
‘Studio’ sounding reverbs can be great for this, and while not long, modulated and exciting per se, they can give a whole drum kit or entire mix the feeling that it’s been performed in the same space.
We’ll be rolling out a whole heap of plugin related content this month, so check back regularly!
