The whole purpose of this is to add a lot of warmth and saturation to the timbre, so that it sounds less sterile.
For this I stack a bunch of free plugins, you can use any variation of plugins you want, but I find these work for me.
They are stacked in the following order, from bottom to top:
- Synthmaster
- VOS BootEQ Mk II
- Klanghelm MJUCJr
- VOS ThrillSeekerLA
- my DAW equalizer
- vladg Limiter n°6
BootEQ: I use it to enhance the bass. I add +4 to LF at 70 Hz.
MJUCJr: first level of compression +15 compress, +8 Makeup, Fast
ThrillSeekerLA: compression + amplification (be careful with this one as you can easily saturate the rest of the chain). +9 input and -3 output
Equalizer: low cut at 35 Hz, 18 db/oct (i.e 3 pole filter) or more to remove extreme subbass. You can also enhance the bass by a couple of dB at 40 dB, but don't overdo it, since we've already increased the bass with BootEQ. The sound is at risk of muddiness.
Limiter n°6: compressor -6dB input, 1.6 ratio, dry mix -20dB; peak limiter in soft mode, -1 dB threshold; clipper on
These are indications based on my tests but you can modify these to your taste. Make sure you don't saturate the input of each plugin, - in particular with ThrillSeekerLA -, else you will get degradation of the sound. So it's good to reduce the gain output of a plugin or the input of the following one. The limiter is also there as a security to protect your ears and speakers during your tweakings. With the settings above, the sound level is roughly doubled compared to Synthmaster alone.
That stack will add a latency of 1024 samples and use up quite a bit of CPU, but with it I get great sounds out of most synthesizers, and I find that Synthmaster sounds pretty amazing, so it's well worth the trouble.
Feel free to share the result of your own experiments and recipes in this thread.
PS: To compare before and after, of course, you must be at equal volume, as the ear often favors the loudest sound, regardless of quality. So you should check with a plugin that shows the volume. I use ToneBoosters EBULoundness (not free), but there are free plugins that give those statistics.
