So after years of stacking plugins and tweaking eq settings without being able to get my vocals sounding like I would like them, I inserted a free plugin, the Acustica Audio AcquaVox, and was completely blown away. One little plugin with 4 knobs suddenly made my vocals awesome. With a little research I discovered this plugin is an emulation of the tube preamp section of the Manley Voxbox, which is basically your top tier goto vocal preamp and will set you back about $4000 USD.
The plugin requires a lot of headroom, and prefers an input signal at or under -18db. If your signal is a bit too hot the beautifying effects of the plugin won't be all that evident, and if the signal is very hot you will likely get some distortion in the low frequencies. Anyway, with the right signal input the results are very subtle but outrageously wonderful. I'm not good at describing this sort of thing, but it removes everything in my vocals that sounds awful, maybe this is from rounding of the transients. It just makes everything sound smooth, like no equalization is necessary after the fact. The low mids become sort of smooth and creamy, just totally delicious. Then the highs have a very subtle sort of sheen to them.
The plugin has a couple drawbacks however. One, it has crazy high latency, like no other plugin of any sort I have used. Two, since it was created with convolution from an actual Manley Voxbox, it can't really be tailored. It's a picture of the effect a specific machine has on an audio signal.
So my question is, can FabFilter Saturn be used to create something along the lines of this very subtle, seriously high quality preamp sound? Can Saturn smoothen the sound (removing/smearing transients?) and make the sound richer rather than dull? Can Saturn make the mids and mid lows creamy, and can it add a very subtle, high quality sheen to the highs? There are probably other things going on that I am not able to identify, not being a signal expert of any kind. The result seems to be a gestalt of many really subtle effects.
First I want to make sure I wouldn't be wasting my time trying to create something like this with Saturn only to give up after a couple years of tweaking. Then if it is likely possible, I would seriously appreciate any help on how I might go about creating this. A handful of Preamp presets for Saturn would be appreciated beyond words.
So after years of stacking plugins and tweaking eq settings without being able to get my vocals sounding like I would like them, I inserted a free plugin, the Acustica Audio AcquaVox, and was completely blown away. One little plugin with 4 knobs suddenly made my vocals awesome. With a little research I discovered this plugin is an emulation of the tube preamp section of the Manley Voxbox, which is basically your top tier goto vocal preamp and will set you back about $4000 USD.
The plugin requires a lot of headroom, and prefers an input signal at or under -18db. If your signal is a bit too hot the beautifying effects of the plugin won't be all that evident, and if the signal is very hot you will likely get some distortion in the low frequencies. Anyway, with the right signal input the results are very subtle but outrageously wonderful. I'm not good at describing this sort of thing, but it removes everything in my vocals that sounds awful, maybe this is from rounding of the transients. It just makes everything sound smooth, like no equalization is necessary after the fact. The low mids become sort of smooth and creamy, just totally delicious. Then the highs have a very subtle sort of sheen to them.
The plugin has a couple drawbacks however. One, it has crazy high latency, like no other plugin of any sort I have used. Two, since it was created with convolution from an actual Manley Voxbox, it can't really be tailored. It's a picture of the effect a specific machine has on an audio signal.
So my question is, can FabFilter Saturn be used to create something along the lines of this very subtle, seriously high quality preamp sound? Can Saturn smoothen the sound (removing/smearing transients?) and make the sound richer rather than dull? Can Saturn make the mids and mid lows creamy, and can it add a very subtle, high quality sheen to the highs? There are probably other things going on that I am not able to identify, not being a signal expert of any kind. The result seems to be a gestalt of many really subtle effects.
First I want to make sure I wouldn't be wasting my time trying to create something like this with Saturn only to give up after a couple years of tweaking. Then if it is likely possible, I would seriously appreciate any help on how I might go about creating this. A handful of Preamp presets for Saturn would be appreciated beyond words.
Cheers,
Greg Houston
The Plugin:
www.acustica-audio.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=83&Itemid=153
The Actual Unit:
www.manley.com/mvbx.php#qna