Flanger2 was the first freebie to use the concepts introduced in Console. It’s the Flanger plugin, but with enhanced depth and spatiality to the sound. You can do both jet-fighter ‘center cancel’ flange and fat additive flange, and you can get audio-frequency sweep rates- plus, it can work as its own kind of distorter.
Flanger2 runs 140 samples of latency.
ConsoleDemo was a huge innovation. Before this set of plugins, all my attempts to bring analog flavor to the digital buss were forms of coloration or saturation. The full spiel here can be found at the entry for Console2, where you can find the link to buy it: here, I’ll just talk about what changed and how it started.
One interesting thing about Console is that it’s incredibly simple. The encoding plugin, ConsoleChannel, is strikingly simple and the decode plugin, ConsoleBuss isn’t much more complicated. This helped me get richness of tone through not over-processing.
The other thing about Console of course is that it confuses everybody ;) however, it shouldn’t, because you can manipulate it and it’ll still work if not set up perfectly. The basic idea is that you should have ConsoleChannel on all channels, POST-fader if you can, and ConsoleBuss first on the 2-buss. It matches up in that way so that the individual sounds are as near to unprocessed as you can get. All the special ways to use Console are just manipulating what’s ‘inside’ this special summing buss (produced by the combination of the encode/decode plugin) and what’s outside.
Console lends itself to template use: you can set up a template with Console all pre-installed and just go. Since there are no controls on either Console plugin (another thing that confuses people) there’s nothing to fiddle with.
If you’d like the original Console, buy Console2 and ask for the original by email. I’ll send it.
ToTapeDemo is the start of the ToTape lineage, a set of plugins that have kept on getting closer and closer to the sound of analog tape off a good reel to reel.
It started out with four controls: Tape Slam, Treble Soften, Head Bump and Output Level. Quickly it became obvious that ‘tape slam’ was more the domain of Iron Oxide, and ToTape wasn’t about ‘slam’ but about giving the right texture to a mixdown.
This early, the head bump code was almost unmanageable: it’s huge-sounding but not what I’d call realistic. This is one of those plugins where I strongly recommend the most recent version over the early ones, as I feel I’ve continued to refine and improve it, fixing issues as they became apparent such as the heavy subsonics content.
ToTape also included a plugin that some people liked, ‘FromTape’. That is simply the ToTape treble soften and saturation code, minus the head bump. ToTape3 also included a FromTape variant, so you can pick either if you’re fishing for historical plugins. This one is the one without flutter (the most basic) and FromTape3 has flutter. They’re like secret weapons now, useful for softening edges in a particular way, not directly available anymore.
But if you would like a copy of those or the original ToTape, you can still have one, by purchasing the current ToTape and asking me in email. I’ll send one.
ESP was the precursor to BitGlitter. You can even see that it’s got ‘Bit Glitter’ on its only control. This was meant to be an Emu SP-1200, but it didn’t really manage to do that. However, it did manage to produce a legit sound of its own, in that general area.
ESP bitcrushes and sample rate chops, and then smooths out the result to produce more of an ‘analog device’ output rather than straight-up digital derezzing.
