New Plug-in: Blue Cat's Spinal Vibe Augmented Rotary Speaker Simulator

[Blue Cat Audio]

Dear KVR Members,

We are happy to announce the release of Blue Cat's Spinal Vibe 1.0, a brand new "augmented" rotary speakers simulation plug-in.

Blue Cat's Spinal Vibe is a rotary speaker emulator that goes way beyond the scope of traditional simulations, thanks to a couple of twists: with up to 3 rotative speakers, advanced control over the rotational behavior of each speaker, slow or fast speed selection and anything in between (instant brake included), host tempo synchronization with phase adjustment, dry/wet control and more (details below), the plug-in offers a lot of flexibility. It covers a wide range of effects usually not available to traditional rotary speakers.

Finding a great tone is however made easy with the tone maps explorer, a unique tool to explore presets and create new tones without dealing with parameters.

To celebrate the launch, Blue Cat's Spinal vibe is available at 25% discount until November 10th. Existing customers will receive an even more attractive offer via email. Demo versions in most common plug-in formats for Mac and PC are available for download on www.bluecataudio.com.

Spinal Vibe 1.0 Main Features:
- Advanced rotary speaker emulation.
- Up to 3 speakers.
- Slow and fast speed, with control over the acceleration and deceleration for each speaker.
- Brake control.
- Rotation can be synced to tempo.
- Control the phase and rotation direction of each speaker.
- Manage the amount of each effect for each speaker: Doppler, tremolo and filter.
- Adjust the volume of each speaker.
- Independent stereo control for each speaker.
- Manage the crossover filters frequency and slope.
- Find new tones easily with the Tone Maps explorer.
- Multicore processing to minimize CPU usage.

System requirements:
- Apple Silicon or Intel Mac running Mac OS 10.9 or newer.
- PC running Windows Vista or newer.

Introduction Price until November 10th:
- Blue Cat's Spinal Vibe: 59 USD/EUR (instead of 79)

Enjoy!

[Nug Wrangler]

Cool!

[Blue Cat Audio]

New videos are available, check out some organ tones here:

[jens]

This is a weird one tbh - I purchased it without trying, but when I finally did test it, I was quite surprised at how little it does as compared to other rotary emulation (and also real ones)....

it's a bit hard to describe.... It's like... the signal doesn't really sound like going through speakers at all here.

[Blue Cat Audio]

Thank you for your purchase. The plug-in is focused on the rotary effects (there is no cabinet/speaker filtering or distortion, you can add whatever amp sim/IR plugin before if this is what you are after - it works pretty well with Destructor for example), but it can actually be pretty "heavy" it terms of what it does to the signal.

[Lotuz2019]

So Spinal Vibe looks like a Leslie cabinet, but it doesn't sound like a Leslie cabinet? Now it is nice to be able to use just the rotary effect and combine it with other amps and speakers, but if I were you, I wouldn't use this skin to advertise my product then.

[Blue Cat Audio]

It can actually sound like a Leslie effect, it's just not an exact emulation of a Leslie cab, just like it does not exactly look like one!

[Lotuz2019]

nvm

[jens]

It can actually sound like a Leslie effect

But I didn't manage to get that out of it tbh... (I also tried the respective presets)

[jens]

Thank you for your purchase. The plug-in is focused on the rotary effects (there is no cabinet/speaker filtering or distortion, you can add whatever amp sim/IR plugin before if this is what you are after

I must admit that you lost me there - of course I can add an amp before it, that's a non-issue and not what I was talking about; however the speaker-emulation is a completely dfferent thing, since it's actually the speakers themselves that are rotating in the room (independently of each other) - so how would it help to add IRs before your plugin that aims to emulate these rotating speakers?

[Blue Cat Audio]

It can actually sound like a Leslie effect

But I didn't manage to get that out of it tbh... (I also tried the respective presets)

That's odd. What kind of audio source are you processing?

[Blue Cat Audio]

I must admit that you lost me there - of course I can add an amp before it, that's a non-issue and not what I was talking about; however the speaker-emulation is a completely dfferent thing, since it's actually the speakers themselves that are rotating in the room (independently of each other) - so how would it help to add IRs before your plugin that aims to emulate these rotating speakers?

It's just that sometimes some people expect to have a tube preamp built-in with some saturation when pushed. IRs won't help with the rotation effect indeed. However when using distortion, if you expect some extra filtering by the Leslie speakers, an IR can help, that's all. I hope this clarifies.

[jens]

It can actually sound like a Leslie effect

But I didn't manage to get that out of it tbh... (I also tried the respective presets)

That's odd. What kind of audio source are you processing?

vocals and guitar - the sources I mostly use rotary-speakers on - I also compared it directly to the usual suspects...

[jens]

It's just that sometimes some people expect to have a tube preamp built-in with some saturation when pushed.

Well, the two real rotaries I have (Dynacord DC 300E/Solton Twin Jet) are both solid state , so that certainly isn't at all what irks me personally...

I can't really put my finger on it (for lack of knowledge actually - I can only go by ear and experience), but I have a hunch that both the filter-steepness/resonances and LFO shapes are kind of off.

[Blue Cat Audio]

Maybe let's follow up on support: if you can share a few dry & wet samples of what your are trying to achieve we can probably find a solution.