Here’s a little trick any PT guys out there can play with to WARM up just about ANYTHING.
I’m on day 2 of getting acquainted with stock plugins.
So my big fail last night in trying to mix with stock PT plugins had to do with not knowing how to get a good distortion on an aux bus. So I started experimenting this morning trying some stuff that Tom Lord Alge mentioned at NAMM in one of his seminars. He showed he was using the Avid Lo-Fi to compensate for not having SSL drive in some places. Yay! Right? I tried it. Sounded like shit.
So I went to the Avid Sans-Amp (which is also a stock PT plugin) thinking I could dial it in to sound like console drive. Nope. The limitations in the EQ curves in the Sans-Amp just won’t work. Its good for distorting other things, but not good at emulating console drive.
Here’s what I figured out…gain compensation, EQ curve -> Then into the Lo-Fi. It’s not spot on, but its the sound I was looking for. Here’s the settings and some clips. This is my 9-foot Baldwin Concert grand (model D) tracked with Earthworks mics into Yamaha preamps.
note: This saturation chain is sitting on a parallel bus
The raw piano
With exaggerated distortion from the SoundToys pultec
With exaggerated distortion (gain matched) using stock PT plugins
Not bad eh?
Here’s the settings!
