Best channel strip plugin that's NOT emulation of SSL, Neve, API, Amek, etc.

[antic604]

Anyway, the title of this thread isn't "why would anyone use channel strip plugins", so if you - and @BONES - can't see the point, just skip it

It's quite hard to see the point when no-one will answer a simple question or two. It makes it look like you actually don't know or, at the very least, you lack the confidence in what you are doing to explain it to others. The over-the-top defensiveness that you get instead of proper answers tends to reinforce this perception, too. Because if you ask me why I do something, I am more than happy to tell you in as much detail as you like. Is returning that simple courtesy really so hard?

I don't have to answer to your particular question, because in this very topic I already explained - before you graciously barged in - why I like channel strip plugins.

But I'll repeat and read this under the assumption channel strips are meant to be used for mixing, not for shaping sound inside an FX chain (although obviously no one can prohibit that):

• they've most of tools (at minimum a gate, compressor, EQ) in one device, best ones on one page with dedicated 1:1 controls

• they've very limited visual feedback - no fancy EQ curves or gate/compressor transfer curves - so you actually need to focus & listen, disregarding the actual values or "shapes" you dial in

• as many of them are inspired / based / modelled on classic large-format mixing desks, I can assume they were designed with reasonable ranges & sweet spots that will do the job, unlike individual devices (like say ProQ3) that can go from gentle mastering moves to crazy sound design sculpting - I've already done my sound design earlier, now I'm just mixing the stems or audio recordings

• they provide common workflow and coherent "sound" to your whole mix (even before any of that elusive warmth, mojo, glue, punch, sheen... and other such buzzwords) with some of them giving you overview of many channels at once and/or allowing you to control several instances at once

[antic604]

I think this thread is a bit of a misleading... as it doesn't ask why a not emulated strip may be wanted. Emulated channel strips are copies of designs that were iterated over for many years. So there's no guarantee that a not emulated channel strip is going to be either better, or preferable.

How is it misleading? I never implied that "unbranded" channel strips are in any way better than emulations. I specifically wanted to avoid discussion of countless SSL, Neve, API, etc. clones in here, because that'd descend into subjective comparisons of how this version is better than the other one, how they got wrong some detail compared to the original or how Dirk Ulrich is a piece of s**t... Just check the bx_console Amek 9099 thread for a flavour of such a discussion & multiply it by 10.

[LeVzi]

but the dev passed away IIRC, and it never got further developed which was really a shame, as it was a brilliant channel strip.

No, he didn't - he only faked his own death, plus he was not even the coder - Michael Olsen of Sonic Timeworks fame was.

Really ? So was it updated and continued or just died when he fake died ?

Actually it had already died before Reason Lahalla pulled that stunt - according to him he couldn't reach Michael Olsen anymore to even just get him to fix/improve stuff, so he wanted to disctontinue it and announced a V2, which was supposed to get coded by someone else - yet that never saw the light of day because Reason "died" shortly after. I seem to remember DNR having had to mourn further deaths too and some severe illnesses or stuff?

Weirdly enough most everything that Michael Olsen ever touched got discontinued in strange or even bizarre ways, with at least two developers/companies having taken the money and run (Keytosound and DNR Collaborative). Talented a coder he is, I don't think even just a single plugin he ever coded survived until today - odd fella himself, I would guess.

Oh good grief, wtf is up with people. Well thanks for bringing me up to date, I had no idea it was all a hoax. But as I said before, is a shame as Mixcontrol was actually a decent channel strip.

[BONES]

I don't have to answer to your particular question, because in this very topic I already explained - before you graciously barged in - why I like channel strip plugins.

Nothing you said after this answers my question. Although it does raise a couple - what makes you think "sound design" and mixing are two separate processes and what advantages do you see in treating them that way? It seems like a duplication of effort to me. e.g. You decide that you need lots of mid-range in a particular part so you boost it during the "sound design" stage, maybe deliberately with EQ but more likely with saturation or through filter settings without really knowing that you're doing it, then you go to the mixing stage and discover it is muddying up your mix so you cut the same frequencies that you boosted earlier. Surely it's easier to work on each channel within the context of your mix from the very start, ensuring that it all fits together seamlessly throughout the process?

It comes down to maintaining maximum flexibility - being able to easily make big changes to things you may have done early in the process, like replacing one instrument with another, right up until the very end of the process, without having to go back and re-do other things. But once you render stems, you're creating a point beyond which you can't go back without having to render those stems again later. That makes it far less likely that you'll bother and instead you'll try and find some other, less efficacious way of fixing the problem. It's just bad workflow, plain and simple. Or am I missing something here?

But I'll repeat and read this under the assumption channel strips are meant to be used for mixing, not for shaping sound inside an FX chain

Pretty much ALL the effects I use are for mixing. just about every VSTi I use these days has it's own on-board effects for getting the sound right, I only need inserts and sends for the mix and my vox.

[antic604]

Nothing you said after this answers my question. Although it does raise a couple...

Oh I definitely see your point and I even agree on principle, i.e. that one can already mix while doing sound design and that (almost) every tool can be used in either of the stages.

But people are different. When I mix the two, I struggle with finishing anything because I'll endlessly go back & forth between actually writing music, shaping the sounds & mixing them (and even "mastering"), just because I can and it's never perfect. Therefore - for me! - too much flexibility is a problem. I'd rather split those processes, even at the potential cost of reversing some of the decisions I made earlier, because it helps me focus and move on.

My ideal workflow, which I haven't yet managed to implement, would be to quickly program the musical MIDI parts, get the sounds roughly in the ballpark of where I want them, bounce it all to audio, arrange & mix - ideally using channel strips - the stems in separate (sub)project.

Can I please be allowed to do that? Pretty please?!

[Passing Bye]

My ideal workflow, which I haven't yet managed to implement, would be to quickly program the musical MIDI parts, get the sounds roughly in the ballpark of where I want them, bounce it all to audio, arrange & mix - ideally using channel strips - the stems in separate (sub)project.

Can I please be allowed to do that? Pretty please?!

Sounds like a nice plan, but it doesn't work for psytrance tweaking madness you make, there's so much automation going on, that separate mixing session workflow is easier to implement when you are into music that is already half recorded or even better sent to you for mixing, most of the plugin solutions are really made for those kind of folks, that would kill sometimes to get back to source and just tweak few things instead of chaining tons of plugins trying to polish those turds of the stems they received.

Maybe you can force yourself into this workflow, get some lousy comp, use only hardware and maybe even get a mixer, go all Hallucinogen on that mofo!

[antic604]

Sounds like a nice plan, but it doesn't work for psytrance tweaking madness you make, there's so much automation going on...

Well, perhaps I'm willing to sacrifice some of that "madness" to be able to finish a track more often than every 2-3 years

[Passing Bye]

Sounds like a nice plan, but it doesn't work for psytrance tweaking madness you make, there's so much automation going on...

Well, perhaps I'm willing to sacrifice some of that "madness" to be able to finish a track more often than every 2-3 years

Quality over quantity

[Passing Bye]

Maybe this can be interesting to you?

[BONES]

Can I please be allowed to do that? Pretty please?!

I honestly don't think you can if you want to make it as good as it can possibly be. It seems like a lot of extra effort to go to, just for the sake of finishing. The whole point of my workflow is that there is no back and forth, for the simple reason that it's a single process. I'm not going back to swap out one instrument for another, it's forward, forward, forward until I think it's as good as I can make it. And, I have to tell you, if it ever got so bad that I thought one of your channel strip things could help, I'd be going right back to the beginning and finding a different instrument or sound for that part. Maybe for vocals, which just come out the way they come out, but for anything that has the ability to have it's sound changed, I will do as much of the work as I can right there in the isntrument, not further up the signal path where you are really just masking a problem that should properly be fixed at source.

[antic604]

...And, I have to tell you, if it ever got so bad that I thought one of your channel strip things could help, I'd be going right back to the beginning and finding a different instrument or sound for that part. Maybe for vocals, which just come out the way they come out, but for anything that has the ability to have it's sound changed, I will do as much of the work as I can right there in the isntrument, not further up the signal path where you are really just masking a problem that should properly be fixed at source.

In addition to you not being able to empathise and understand that others might have different workflow & struggles in what you find effortless, you're also missing the point of channel strips again. They're there - by design, by replicating the channel strips on a hardware mixing console - to help you mix tracks together. By definition, what comes out of single track is already as good as you could've made it at the time, often over the top. But that's often problematic in the context of the whole mix where you might need to scoop some frequencies here & boost others elsewhere to position instruments, add a sidechained compression or maybe gating to accentuate some transients, etc. Beause of the "bird's eye" view you might even come up with things you wouldn't when you're still working on the micro level. There's reason why the industry has (had?) separate mixing engineers, that'd listen and work on the mix with fresh set of ears. And most succesful musicians also suggest to separate sound design, writing/arranging and mixing, as they require different - or at least fresh - perspective.

Again, I'm not saying the above described workflow is impossible without channel strips, just that they feel naturally "desgined" for this. But you can mix as you go. Or you can use e.g. FabFilter bundle of separate tools to mix stems. Or whatever other combination that works for you.

[jens]

Listen to Bones - he really knows what he's talking about - don 't ever use channel-strips if you want your music to get as good as it can possibly be.

[ghettosynth]

Listen to Bones - he really knows what he's talking about - don 't ever use channel-strips if you want your music to get as good as it can possibly be.

Moving on...

I've often felt that the real advantage to emulation strips, especially those that are at the top of the popularity chain, e.g., SSL (of whatever flavor) is the familiarity. I don't even mean with people who have used the console, rather, that they are so commonly emulated that anyone who uses plugins has to be somewhat familiar with them.

Without trying I have about a half dozen or so SSL EQ emulations. I don't think that I've intentionally purchased a single one of them.

At any rate, I take the OPs point that you any conversation about such strips will devolve into pointless debate over which one sounds the most like the actual console, but if we agree in principle to poke sticks at everyone in the thread who tries to take it in that direction, which features stand out among common strips as the most useful?

Asked differently, if you were going to build a hardware controller like softube's console 1, what would you include and what would you leave off?

[jens]

While I partly agree in regards to the familiarity aspect, I think the same basically goes for all our GoTo plugins...
but these basic processes make it really quick and easy to get - as they said in that Flux video I posted a page or two back - about 70% of the mix done quickly. But that is of course only the case if the Channel Strip suits us personally and we are familar with it - and of course we will only get familar with it if it suits us.

And thus I think antic's question is more than fair enough - leave out that "authentic emulation" bit, because that's not what is going to make the channel strip worthwhile for us in the long run - and for the same reason your question is likewise fair enough.

So my personal take on it is this:

The one compressor I keep always gravitating towards is IK's LA2a emu. It just suits me soundwise and is so easy to use. So that would be my choice no. 1 compressor-wise, I guess. And what EQ do I really like? I dunno - perhaps with EQual yet another IK product, but I must say I really like the one in the Evo Channel as well. I also would incude something that does the Pultec trick - perhaps Boz' Bark of Dog.

Saturation wise I think I would go for Decapitator or Waves' Saphira. And then I would add Bootsie's Prefix upfront for phase-correction, gate, etc.

[The Noodlist]

Nasty VCS, beta 64bit. I really like the Pultec eq section. It's OK for basic usage.
https://varietyofsound.wordpress.com/blog/