UAD make some of the most coveted and best selling plugins out there. It also has to be said that, having been in this business as long as they have, they have made an awful lot of plugins. Some don’t get the attention they deserve. Here are 5 “unsung heroes” - Great plugins which you should check out.
Avalon VT-737sp Channel Strip
Avalon’s most popular product, this high end channel strip is rightly regarded by many as a classic but is possibly misunderstood by some. It’s a very polished sounding tube preamp with an optical compressor and a very capable EQ section. Frequently associated with Hiphop and R&B production it’s a classic front end for such styles. Paired with a nice Neumann or possibly a Sony C800G it’s a vocal front end with some bling to it. Rated as a great DI for bass the Unison technology found in UAD hardware means and the tactile control offered by UA hardware means that the sweet spots won’t be too hard to find in this classy sounding and surprisingly flexible channel strip.
We Like:
The 32KHz setting for the high shelf in the EQ section gives the famous Air band of the Maag Eq a run for its money.
The x4 attack switch in the compressor section, not available in the hardware version makes a comparatively slow optical compressor very grabby indeed. Put some drums through it and you might be surprised.
Neve Preamp
The fact that the Neve Preamp is a plugin version of the Neve 1290 which was a rare preamp-only version of the classic Neve design found in the 1073 won’t be the headline for most people. The fact that just like the full-fat 1073 and 1084 plugins; it’s a Unison enabled Neve preamp emulation but without the processing hit caused by the EQ, Thats the headline. For tracking with Apollo interfaces this is ideal.
But there’s more. You might imagine that a Neve preamp with no EQ would be of limited interest when mixing but as the owner of a hardware BAE Neve clone I can confirm that a Neve preamp is very useful indeed as a mixing tool. The big, rich sound of the Neve circuit and the saturation and softening of the transients caused by those transformers can sound fantastic on any element of a mix. Just crank the input and trim back the output.
We Like:
Heavy saturation on bass guitars, try switching to Mic mode for full-on distortion, but mute your monitors first!
Ocean Way Studios
Is it a reverb? It is if you want it to be but it’s so much more. Ocean Way Studios is to our knowledge unique. When every mic console, piece of outboard and even monitoring system has been modelled and turned into a plugin, what is left in the big name studios which they have and no-one else does? The answer is the tracking space. The only example we can think of of a well known studio live room having been modelled is Ocean Way Studios. While you can use it as a reverb that is only one of its modes. The other “Re-Mic Mode” allows you to choose from a selection of positions for the sound source in either of two tracking spaces and freely position and balance up to 3 pairs of mics in the space choosing from a selection from the world class mic locker at Ocean Way.
We Like:
Re-Miking the overheads on a drum recording made in a frustratingly small space with a pair of virtual U67s in an epic sounding tracking space.
Oxide Tape
So if the Studer A800 plugin has the same DSP usage as Oxide, why would I use Oxide? It a fair question and the easy answer is that Oxide costs less than half what the Studer does. However money isn’t everything. Is there another reason to use Oxide? I’d say there is. Both plugins were created by the same team and both sound really good. The thing you are missing in Oxide compared to the Studer is choices of tape formulation and access to the “tweaks”. Personally I’ve never touched the bias or head EQ settings and unless you have strong feelings about tape formulation the simplicity of Oxide combined with its lower price make it the obvious choice.
The benefit of tape modelling comes from the cumulative contribution these processes make across many tracks in your session and 90% of the sound comes from how hard you hit the tape. In Oxide that’s the main decision you have to make. That’s a big contrast with the Studer. I’m old enough to have used tape because its all we had. Normal people using tape machines didn’t tweak the setup of the machine, it was set up for one type of tape and that’s what we used. The decision we did make every time was how hard to hit the tape. It’s the same with Oxide.
We like:
Option+Command clicking on a whole row on Oxide Inserts in Pro Tools to bypass them all at the same time and getting that “Oh, that was really helping, turn it back on” moment.
Century Channel Strip
There are two modes in Console, UAD Mon and UAD Rec. If you’ve never explored them they give you the option to either monitor through your UAD processing or to record the sound complete with UAD processing, know as “printing” the effect. Lots of respected engineers encourage use of this printing workflow, committing the sound at the recording stage. It’s natural to be wary of words like commitment and for the wary the Century Channel Strip is ideal. A great sounding combination of a Unison tube preamp with a fool-proof optical compressor and the most benign EQ you could ask for. Whatever decisions you make with this channel strip are almost guaranteed to be good ones. No baked-in mistakes here, just do-no-harm EQ, supportive compression and a nice tubey suzz sprinkled over the top.
We like:
How this sounds on vocals, sort of “more of everything”.
If you are a UAD user take a look at your installed plugins and look to see whether there are any plugins which are overlooked. Why is that? Share your most overlooked plugins in the comments.