Recording - December 2011 - 30

plus a wide variety of pan shapes (from a simple sinewave to wobbling and stepped panning). You can combine panning with tremolo by varying the offset between the two channels’ LFOs, and there are no fewer than four ways to calculate power distribution between Left and Right (panning laws)! The metering is very useful, showing input, LFO amount, and output from top to bottom, with the meters moving out from the center for easy readability. Both plug-ins offer full MIDI Learn capability (including keyboard-controlled pitch shift on Discord3) and both sound awesome. While Discord3 can be as raucous as its name suggests, it can also produce subtle and evocative pitch and delay effects, and as an old fan of autopanners I find Panstation an absolute delight... if you can imagine a particular way to move audio around the stereo field, Panstation can probably do it for you. Two thumbs up for adding a bit of Audio Damage to your holidays!

Slate Digital Virtual Console Collection
$249.99, RC-Tube alone $49; www.slatedigital.com Analog summing is a big deal to a lot of folks, and has spawned a wide variety of summing hardware, both factory-built and homemade. In November 2011 we reviewed the RMS216 Folcrom summing mixer from Roll Music Systems. As it turns out, the Folcrom was first built as a custom unit for Steven Slate, the man behind Slate Digital. With the help of Fabrice Gabriel, the mad scientist behind the uber-cool Eiosis plug-ins, Steven set as his goal the recreation of analog summing’s yummy factor, entirely in the box. The Virtual Console Collection is meant to add the nonlinearities and unique distortion characteristics of classic analog mixing consoles to the tracks in your DAW, making them sound better in the mix. The VCC includes two plug-ins, the Virtual Channel, placed on individual tracks as an insert, and the Virtual Mixbuss, strapped across your Master bus or stereo returns. The Channel plug-in has a VU meter with user-adjustable ballistics and three simple controls: Console (see below), Input level, and Drive, where you add or take away console mojo without altering your output level. The Virtual Mixbuss adds a second VU and takes away the Input control. There are five Consoles available, with names hinting at the vintage consoles that were modeled: Brit 4k, US A Discrete, Brit N Discrete, and Psi, plus the brand-new RC-Tube model released the very day we began our tests (and available on its own at a reduced price for a limited time). There’s no “right” or “wrong” console for a particular application; you try different settings and listen for what sounds right. The VCC plug-ins have their own built-in grouping, so a single set of controls can quickly set console characteristics for multiple channels, a subgroup, or an entire mix. If you want to tweak one channel’s settings a little bit away from those of other channels in the group, it’s easy to do so by control-clicking on that channel’s greyed-out knob. And there’s more: Under the hood, you can gang grouped plug-ins to follow one automation lane, adjust calibration settings, mess with oversampling... all the stuff you’d want to do with a real analog console and with a properly-integrated high-end plug-in. So: simple controls, good metering, easy grouping. But what about the sound? That’s the tough part. The VCC does something, but what it does is very subtle and not easy to categorize; it is not just boosting levels or mucking with eq... some elements in a mix will rise to the top, others will sink, and ideally everything will gently fit together better in the end. It’s not a night-and-day effect, and I don’t think it should be... after all, I don’t think many analog summing fanatics would claim summing can turn manure into gold on its own! But it is there, and I liked what it did for my mixes in my unscientific A/B tests.

Granular, a chaos-infected granular pitch shifter that can perform subtle pitch tweaks or blow your audio out of the water. The shifters offer a very musical octave of shift... and then two more octaves beyond that. This is Audio Damage, after all! Discord3 has two identical but separate processor chains for Left and Right, easily linkable with a button press so you can set both sides simultaneously. (Note that this is not the same as summing the input to mono and feeding both sides with it; Discord3 doesn’t do that.) Each chain begins with the pitch shifter, then goes to a syncable delay with up to 2 seconds of delay time; feedback from the delay is fed back before the pitch shifter, so repeats are pitch shifted again and again. Finally, there’s a multimode filter with graphically adjustable frequency and bandwidth. An LFO can control pitch shift amount, delay time, or filter frequency. Panstation is a highly controllable autopanner modeled loosely on the Drawmer M500 and the Audio & Design PanScan, vintage autopanners from the pre-computer era. It offers precise control over pan rate and depth, host sync, pan triggering (by MIDI input or audio signals) and LFO phase,
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RECORDING DECEMBER 2011

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Recording - December 2011

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