Where this comes from
My first sound card was one I soldered myself. The machine was an IBM PC running at 4.77 MHz, and the card was eight resistors wired side by side into the printer port: 1k, 2k, 4k, 8k, 16k and up. The sound was crude, but set against the PC’s built-in beep it was a long step forward. Real sounds, and it felt like living in the future.
From there it was Scream Tracker and composing, and then a Gravis UltraSound in the early nineties, which brought something close to CD quality within reach of a home machine. Multitrack cards were still priced out of reach, so I bought two four-channel cards instead and synchronised them on a shared clock signal.
Eight channels recorded at once, in the middle of the 1990s, because the alternative was not to record at all.
I started recording digitally on a PC properly in 1998, among the first to move multitrack work off tape and into the computer. The transition was quick, and since then analog tape has been something I use for mastering rather than for tracking. I have been mixing for over twenty-five years and running a recording studio professionally since 2005, and in that time I have spent tens of thousands of hours inside audio plug-ins.
That many hours teaches you something that is hard to see from the outside. A plug-in either helps you or stands in your way, and the dividing line is almost never the DSP. It is the interface. Analog hardware is at its best as a three-dimensional physical object, something your hands know in the dark. Photograph that object, flatten it onto a monitor and give it to a mouse, and the nostalgia survives while everything that made the original fast to use is gone.
The most-used tools in this series therefore take their shape from the way people work today. How closely they resemble the hardware they descend from is a secondary question.
Tradition, without the furniture
None of which means throwing the traditions out. A FET compressor is allowed to look like the classic it descends from, and this one does, with a facelift and with features the original never offered. PuluTec Tape leaves out the full-screen photograph of a reel-to-reel machine and gives you the controls that matter, with two large input and output meters where you can actually see them.
The modulation effects and the compressor put mode selection at the top, with working presets in pill boxes directly underneath, so one click gets you into the right neighbourhood. More presets live in the preset menu, and every parameter can be set from scratch when you would rather do it yourself.
The EQ took the opposite approach from the start: entirely modern, built around being intuitive under the hand, and carrying several features that no other equalizer currently offers. Nodes can be static, dynamic or spectral as needed. A piano keyboard replaces the frequency scale when you are working to pitch. A resonance finder turns a problem frequency into a cut with one click, and placement on the stereo signal, left, right, mid or side is chosen per node instead of per instance.
Speech and podcasts
The speech tools come from a different kind of experience. Mixing a podcast is usually not a creative problem. It is the same manual work over and over: leakage between open microphones, levels that swing wildly inside a single sentence, a room that was never meant for recording, music that has to move out of the way of a voice.
These plug-ins are built to take that work off the mixer’s hands, and they come at it from both directions. If you want two knobs and a result, that is there. If you are an engineer who wants to see the detection, set the ratios and decide where the thresholds sit, that is there too, in the same plug-in. Several of them also talk to each other inside the project, so an instance on one speaker’s track knows what is happening on the others. That is a problem no single-track plug-in can solve, however good it is.
The aim stays honest about its limits. Clinically perfect isolation is won in the recording and not in the processing, so what these tools offer is the removal of whatever gets in the way, and nothing beyond that.
The everyday set
The rest of the series exists because I wanted versions of the plug-ins I reach for daily, built to work the way I work. Everything a professional mixer needs for the job, with no one-trick ponies: practical tools that make mixing fast and predictable.
Why this is not another bundle
These days anyone can generate a hundred plug-ins in an afternoon and put them online as freeware. One of them might be a gem. The others are mediocre at best. What they lack is the part that cannot be generated: twenty-five years of listening to the results in a professional room, against hardware that has been doing the job for decades.
Every plug-in here was built because it was needed in real work, and it stayed in the series only once it had earned its place in real mixes. Modern tools are used to build them, because there is no romance in writing boilerplate by hand. What to build, and whether the result actually sounds right, are decisions that come from the ear and from the hours behind it.
Panu
Panu is a composer and multi-instrumentalist, guitar first, who has been breathing audio since his teens. He is an engineer by training and by temperament, the kind who would rather build the thing than wait for someone else to sell it to him, and he has built his own recording studio, including a good deal of the equipment in it.
The habit of not leaving things alone runs through everything. In the sonarmods.com project he took apart the interface of a commercial DAW because he wanted it to look better on his own screen, and then wrote himself a scripting language to drive the program’s functions from outside it.
He is also an award-winning producer of spoken-word audio and has been recording podcasts for ten years, which is where the speech tools come from. He knows the traps in capturing speech from the inside, having fallen into most of them himself.
At his engineering graduation the rector closed with a line that stuck: if an engineer doesn’t know something, he can go and find out, and learn it. Panu was foolish enough to believe it.