In Praise of a Plug-In But Not an Ad
First off, I'm already feeling self-conscious about how this feels like an ad for a company that doesn't need any more marketing help, but it's top of mind for me right now.
I love the API Vision Channel Strip Collection plug-in from UAD. You can google it I'm sure. I feel like a little moralizing today so I'm not going to link it.
But anyway: I'm working on an album mix right now, hopefully out later this year. It consists of edited improvisations mostly sourced from my Eurorack set-up. These improvisations have a tendency to be spiky and spectrally dense which almost always sounds good to me in the room, but makes them hard to slot into a focused track. I went through something similar on my Every Day Carry release a few years ago, but in that case it was field recordings. Both on that release and this new one, the API 550L parametric EQ was an unbelievable god-send. There are, of course, a million EQs any of us could reach for, but the limitations built into the parametric structure of this one really worked in my favor. That and it's modeled after high dollar gear.
The 550L has four bands, all four of which have adjustable center frequencies and can go +/- 12dB in all cases. Even just as a learning tool this is powerful: set one to cut or boost at 700Hz, say, and sweep it to max and min to get a handle on what 700Hz actually feels like in a mix. Doing this over and over helped me sharpen my capacity to perform surgical EQing without relying on visual feedback which has legitimately improved my mixing and mastering by leaps and bounds.
The 225L compressor is also an excellent first compressor in the chain to grab fast transients. Or, I don't know, that's at least how I use it. Ask the pros if I'm right or wrong. Set it so it reacts fast to the highest peaks (in my case the feedback squelches) and then smooth the whole thing out later with an LA-2A clone you also got from UAD (smdh) and you're cooking.
More details on the actual album later. Today it's gear talk.