Satin: Mastering and potential updates?

[Sleepwalker]

Hey,
So I would love to use Satin in mastering because how lovely, smooth and lively it can make the HF. At current state I cant use it on the 2bus because it changes the LF to much. Solution could be to add an internal sidechain hipass filter on Satin! (Or some way to force the low freqs unprocessed) Yes there are solutions in some daws to create a hpf sidechain for vstfx but in my experience the crossover always mess to much with the sound. Plugs with internal sc hpf always sound much better then when externally applied.

Thats all I would ever think of asking for Satin that would help me out a lot on a daily basis, othervice it is one of the most perfect and complete vstfx I know of! Amazing for polishing up mixes as is. Ok maybe a sine lfo for the phazer function could be handy, but not a must..

Ps. I know U-He is all about making things sound smooth and pretty, but would be awesome for like a 2.0 release with a third mode, modern, old, and: damaged! For sound design, lofi techno, punk and rock. An added posibility for extreme trashy broken distortion!! But might be the devs wants to keep it like a "hifi" device as it currently is.

[sascha]

The extended low-end excursions and ripple is just what happens on a real-world tape device. That's why there are DIN/IEC + NAB filters included, as these were designed to compensate for the intrinsic behaviour.
There's two ways to counteract if there's too much low-end action going on:
- reduce the amount of 'bump' in the service panel. This dampens the low-end resonances/ripple which occurs as a function of mirror artifacts at the replay/repro head
- choose different compensation curves for rec + repro. Since NAB adds an LF boost below 50Hz, try setting 'rec' to IEC and 'repro' to NAB (since that will compensate for any possible boost from an NAB pre-filter and thus act as a low cut here). Additionally, you may increase the 'gap width' for a more balanced spectral response, while 'bump' decides over how shallow or resonant the remaining bass region will be.

On the 'damage' idea: I generally like distortion but I'm not so sure if it suits the initial product idea, since we wanted to create something that in fact helps people to improve their mixes in terms of punch, definition and coherence. Which is not about audible distortion in the first place. But I see your point, and we should discuss it on next occasion.

[Sleepwalker]

Awesome Sascha, amazing plug you have made here. One of my all time favorites! Cool, I shall try all these tips. Thank you!


Regarding distortion helping mixes with punch, I beg to differ!
Have you herd about Moses Schneider? He does very much so, and in delightfully creative ways.

Check this inspirational video of him "Drums With Character" from SOS:
https://youtu.be/tbPAvl7QA20
(You can skip 9-10min in if you want to hear and see it imediately without intro blabla)

However, again if this should be a thing for Satin or not only you know best ofc. Me, I can never get enough of different types of saturations and distortions. Just like reverbs and compressors, the more the merrier. And ofc as usuall there are just a handfull of high quality ones. I consider Satin one of those among tape plugs, and I think everyone will agree.

There are lots of stuff both software and hardware happening in the saturation/clipping world lately, and more and more people are getting into using it in mixing and tracking, and even mastering. The hottest thing in tape saturation now is the hardware box Zulu. There is quiet a few others aswell. Silver Bullet and the upcoming Cromas are preamp clippers but can be installed with tape saturation aswell. SSL has a 500 module tape fx, and there are much much more stuf like this being very popular atm. All made to shave of transients in a more transparent, dynamics saving, and sweet euphoric way then the likes of compressors and limiters. Most of the classic big studio recordings all up to the mid 90ties/pre protools digital aera was recorded on multichannel tape machines, creating very sweet transient shaving and thus loud but natural sounding mixes, ofc in combination with consoles doing a bit of the same thing before hitting the tape. (The Silver Bullet is designed spesifically for this type of console transient shaving)

I can PM you some great forum thread links if you want regarding this.