Here’s how it works:
1. Buy T-RackS 3 Deluxe for only $199.99/€149.99* on our online store or your preferred music retailer.
2. As soon as 2,000 registrations are received, you will also be given a FREE T-Racks 3 Single title to choose from Black 76 and White 2A.

Make sure to spread the word so everyone gets a better deal! Building your own mixing and mastering studio has never been easier, but hurry, this promotion ends February 29th, 2012.

Check the Group Buy Counter here.

* All prices exclude taxes.

T-RackS 3 Deluxe
A high-end DAW mastering and mixing, with a suite of 9 analog modeled and digital Dynamics/EQ processors, full metering suite, and audio quality that is unmatched in software. All processors and metering module can be combined within the plug-in/standalone suite or are also available as individual plug-ins for more convenient mixing within your DAW, for a truly complete bundle of 12 superior sounding tools.

Black 76 Limiting Amplifier
Modeled after what is probably the most used, most known, most wanted, and most universally recognized compressor / limiter in the audio industry. While there are many revisions of this hardware, IK modeled the LN version, revision E, because it’s the one that has the most sonically recognized and wanted character thanks to its input transformer and class A output stage.

White 2A Leveling Amplifier
Originally intended for use in broadcasting, it immediately became a truly signature unit for music recording and mixing. It’s a must-have for both tracking and mixing vocals, but it’s also tremendously effective on electric bass, upright bass, piano, winds and many other tracks where you need a gentle compression with great warmth and consistency.

UPDATE Feb 8 – IK has added a $99 upgrade option for T-RackS 3 Standard users.

FWIW – IK Multimedia is an advertiser on AudioGeekZine.com. I approached them to sponsor because I use their software.

Which one sounds the best or has the least artifacts?

The source is a MIDI pattern played through Steven Slate Drums. 24 bit, 44.1kHz. A different limiter plugin was applied with both threshold and ceiling set to -6.5dBFS.  Note that Ozone does not allow a ceiling below -5dBFS.

You can download the files. Images can be enlarged.

ADDED JUNE 7

Included with Line 6 POD Farm Free

• Guitar Amps
  • 1964 Blackface ‘Lux
  • Brit J 800
  • Power Amp
• Bass Amps
  • 1989 Eighties
  • 1968 Flip Top
• Cabinets
  • 1×12 Blackface ‘Lux
  • 4×12 Brit Celest T-75s
  • 1×15 Flip Top
  • 4×10 Silvercone
• Preamps
  • American Classic
  • Console
• Distortions
  • Facial Fuzz
  • Screamer
• Dynamics
  • Compressor
  • Noise Gate
  • Vetta Comp
  • Volume Pedal
• Filters
  • Sub Octaves
• Modulations
  • Opto Tremolo
  • Phaser
• Delays
  • Analog Delay w/Modulation
  • Digital Delay
• Reverbs
  • Cavernous
  • Standard Spring
• Wahs
  • Vetta Wah
  • Weeper

As you can see, you get a lot to play with. Additionally, you can insert these effects in any order in the chain as well as multiples of most up to 20 fx. When you buy POD Farm or POD Farm Platinum you get a ton more toys to play with.

Get POD Farm 2.5 Free Version

Formats: Mac/PC, VST, RTAS, AU, Standalone

Vocal Processing And Mixing Tips

Last time I shared some tips for recording great vocals, now lets get them sitting right with the rest of the track.

Cleanup – Before anything, clean up the vocal tracks. Go through and trim the silence around each phrase. Remove any noise, thumps, clicks, pops and gasps. Fade in or out on each edit.

Pitch Correction – Gentle pitch correction with software like Melodyne is a big part in getting that professional sounding vocal we all strive for in our home studio productions. Be careful with this! Doing it right takes time and practice. Over tuned vocals are about as bad as out of tune vocals (you can hear both on American Idol).

EQ – There are no rules and every voice is different but here are some starting points. A high-pass filter (low cut) can be used to clean up the very lows (below 100Hz). 200-600Hz can be gently boosted or cut depending on the voice to add thickness or compensate for proximity. 1kHz-3kHz is usually where the clarity of the vocals is. Above that is brightness, bite, air but look out for sibilance. How much you can boost here depends on the song.

Compression – When it comes to controlling vocal dynamics, using two compressors doing less individually often yields the most transparent result. Use a compressor with fast attack and high ratio (10:1) working just on the peaks, ignoring everything else. The second compressor is set with a 4:1 ratio, a slower attack and release and threshold set so it is always compressing about 2-4dB.

Reverb – Reverb is an effect you’ll want on a separate channel (aux track in Pro Tools, FX Channel in Cubase) rather than having it right on the vocal track. Use a send to add the reverb to the vocals. The reverb time should be related to the tempo of the song, it can really clutter the mix if it’s not. Hall and Plate are the most common types of reverb for vocals. Shaping the reverb sound with EQ is recommended.

Automation – Automating the volume level of the vocals is absolutely essential to getting the vocal to sit right where you want it throughout the song. Automating the reverb send for the vocal will allow you to have just the right amount at any time. You can also automate effects like chorus and delays for the vocals to keep things interesting through the song.

iZotope Nectar – A great all-in-one tool for vocal processing is iZotope Nectar. Eleven effects in one plugin including EQ, Compression, Auto and Manual Pitch Correction, reverb, delay and more.

This plugin is free for a limited time, this is the last week, so get it right now. A Deluxe version with more features is coming.

Formats: PC VST, RTAS. Mac VST, RTAS, AU

Examples

Drum beats processed only with Devil Loc presets. Source is Addictive Drums.

Get Devil-Loc (iLok required)

The Devil-Loc

Essentially a distorting compressor but so much more, it’s really quite simple but also a bit supernatural. Because the release time of the compression is effected by the input level (like the Level-Loc) it’s a bit hard to predict exactly what will happen the first time you work with it. Luckily with just two knobs, you can find the magic spot for your track fairly quickly and you’ll be going for that sound more and more. Don’t be fooled by it’s simple front panel, this plug-in has a lot more cool sounds than you’d expect out of two knobs. Get crushing kick drums, to almost rhythmic level sweeps with the crazing sucking compression, to blitzed out blasting beat loops. Drive it hard and you get straight hardware sounding break-up and drive. It’s a devil in disguise, and the devil’s in the details, and the devil made us do it and all those other devil references.

Devil-Loc Deluxe. Coming April 2011

To take things beyond the hardware that inspired it and give you even more creative flexibility, Devil-Loc Deluxe adds a “Darkness” control for tone, switchable slow or fast release times and the ability to mix the original back in right on the front panel. The addition of these controls opens up the sonic palette immensely. Dark thundering drums, to driven lo-fi loops, and more, and the mix control saves all that tedious routing and lets you automate mix to keep the Devil from taking over the soul of your tracks. This time, evil is good.

A Bit of History

The Shure M62 Level-Loc was designed by Shure to be a leveling amplifier mostly for mics. The concept was it would keep an even level (locked level) once it hit a certain input so you wouldn’t get “fade outs or blasting”. It was super simple with only a switch for three “distance” settings based on how far from the mic you were. The M62V upped the control a bit by adding an input level knob. However, the reason it became famous was not because it did a good job of leveling, it may have, but largely thanks to SoundToys user Tchad Blake and his desire to push, abuse, and do deliciously evil things to his tracks. He discovered that pushing the Level-Loc gave you gritty, dirty, unusual compression that made drums gigantic and nasty. Both of which are good things. So we’ve taken that concept and dropped it in the simple two control Devil-Loc. Then we’ve taken it further than the original hardware with the Devil-Loc Deluxe.

Get Devil-Loc (iLok required)

Click to enlarge images.

Let’s talk about each plugin, starting with CLA Guitars.

The unique thing about CLA Guitars is that I made it for the guitar player that wants to sit late at night, plug in his direct box, and instantly have three choices of sound. Especially with so many people recording DI signals now, there’s that instant gratification, to take a DI signal and automatically get a sound. And the re-amping makes it completely unique, and the EQ I picked is really conducive to guitar. The EQ, compression, and the way the delays are setup, it’s like, the perfect guitar setup.

On a Wurlitzer or a Fender Rhodes, the biggest problem is that you can’t get an authentic sound using a DI, you have to mic the amp. You can use the re-amp on the cleanest setting for a Rhodes or any of the keyboards that you just can’t mic, so it really works for any of your DI needs.

CLA Bass

The hardest thing I always find with bass is getting a good distortion preset, to get a good distortion sound that’s actually useable. So with CLA Bass, I put my three flavors of distortion there that work in every mix. I really took from all the mixes I’ve done and picked the right distortion that you can add to overdrive the bass. Plus, the frequencies I used to boost are just the ones you need: the upper, the mid, the bark, and the bite, so it’s completely tailored just to bass. But like I said, with these plugins, you try them on anything, you’re going to get great results.

CLA Drums

The most important thing to get right is the drums. For CLA Drums, I looked at the kit, I looked at mixes I’ve done, I looked at all the EQs I would use for each drum, and gave you a toggle switch to pick the EQ curves for each of the six drum types. And just for laughs, I put cowbell on there, just so you have a percussion setting with some delay. So that’s designed to just use the compressors and emulation of what I would use to get my drum sound. So it’s really useful, a really hard thing to duplicate later with just piles of plugins. I was really happy with the drum one.

Can it be used on sampled drums instead of a live kit?

Absolutely, that would totally help out BFD or any sample drum library. It’s just designed for the curve and the character of drums and the transient of drums. It’s really built for that.

CLA Vocals

You know that the song is the song when the vocals are right. I’m really fussy with my vocal chains, so on CLA Vocals, I took the three best compressor chains and the EQs that I would use to make the vocal thing happen, and just created the reverb space and the EQ curves that I would use. And that’s the one I end up using the most, because you can go right to it and instantly it has everything you need. Everything I would use in a vocal, it has.

CLA Effects

One of the things that makes the CLA Effects plugin special is the throw. The biggest hassle that you run into when you’re mixing in Pro Tools is when you want to do an echo throw, you want to delay a word. Let’s keep it simple: All you have to do is duplicate your vocal track, put it on 100% wet, automate the throw button in all the spots you want, and you’re done. And you can pick: All my delays are time stamped so, done. Your echo throw is done. And you can EQ it, you can actually put another plugin on it to EQ it or you can have the delay be filtered or reverbed or whatever. So it really shortcuts the stuff that we take for granted.

Aside from the throw button, I put in some filtering and vocal distortion, some effects you can use for distortion, which are really great for delays or vocals. So the stuff that I use as effects on mixes which is, you know, distort something or filter it or built into the plate, that’s all built into that.

CLA Unplugged

CLA Unplugged is like a Swiss-army knife. This is the one that you would use for piano, strings, for keyboards, for acoustic guitars, for stuff that you want big, broad strokes on. What this plugin has that you don’t see in the others is two different reverbs with two sets of pre-delay controls. You know, one of the big sounds from the early ’70s and ’80s was that big pre-delayed plate. You can get massive, long pre-delayed reverbs and sonic soundscapes with Unplugged that would take so many chains to create the same atmosphere. It’s really great on strings, to just have this nice delayed plate and this big broad EQ that’s really thick, with wide shelves, and incredibly smooth compression.

Would Unplugged work on sampled guitars, strings or even synthesizers?

Absolutely. CLA Unplugged is there to help beef up all your DI stuff, all your direct keyboards, all your direct synths. Because by having the reverb and the compression and the EQ, it’ll help amp it up a bit.
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Main features
− Dynamic 12AX7 / ECC83 coupled triode stages analog modeling
− Three channels: clean, rhythm and lead, each with fully separated controls
− Selectable Mono / Stereo processing support
− Selectable oversampling rate (up to 8x)
− Global input / output level controls
− Double precision floating point operations support
− Fully automatable controls

Fully coded in C++ using the Steinberg VST SDK 2.4

Compatibility: Windows 32bit, VST

NOTE: remember that this plugin is a preamp simulator, so you’ll need to use a cabinet simulation after it. Best to use an Impulse Response based plugin, like LeCab from LePou.

DOWNLOAD

Example of the amp in the mix (chain is Noise Gate > Screamer > NRR1 > KeFIR: s-preshigh)

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Nasty DLA

This plug sounds as good as it looks. I’ve already used it with success for vocals in a mix. It sounds fantastic on my favorite synths like V-Station. This can be as clean or as dirty as you want it, it’s pretty flexible. Looks like this is going to be my most used delay.

I only have 2 small complaints with this and Bootsy’s other great effects. 1- No mousewheel control of knobs (yeah most fx are like that) and 2- No Mac version.

If you’re on a PC you’ve got to try this!

Get it here: http://varietyofsound.wordpress.com/downloads/

Plug-in specification:

• input stage model including signal coloration and non-linearities (switchable)
• classic chorus/flanger effect with amount and rate control which automatically adopts to the delay line configuration
• frequency balancing filter for dead-easy overall tone adjustments in the feedback path
• two different feedback color modes
• feedback circuit and control which supports resonance up to self-oscillation
• standard DSP 12dB high-pass filter
• custom “tape style” low-pass filtering
• sophisticated “tape hiss” noise simulation
• negative or positive pre-delay
• comprehensive tape dynamics simulation taken from the core of the award winning FerricTDS
• the dynamics offers a slight audio ducking effect (switchable)
• two independent delay lines with up to 3sec delay time and sync to host
• delay time modulation with two different modes
• additional phase distortion (switchable)
• audio level metering display
• dry/wet controls plus “wet only” option
• power / bypass switch
• all parameters available through host automation

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Little Labs IPB http://littlelabs.com/ibp.html

Radial Phazer http://www.radialeng.com/re-phazer.htm

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