So I’ve decided to bundle them together for the sake of this article. While these are two separate plugins, in my mind, they’ve always been an inseparable pair when looking to impart “the sound of analog” onto a clean, “digital” mix.
Virtual Console Collection + Virtual Tape Machines On that note, let’s take a look at 5 Slate Digital plugins which every mix engineer should own: 1. While audio plugin technology has come leaps and bounds in the last 10 years, the fact that I’m still using both of these plugins in every single mix I do says a lot about their quality. It’s gotten to the point that nowadays, their emulations are “virtually” (get it?) indistinguishable from the real thing. There’s essentially nothing we can fault in this near-perfect virtualisation of one of the most intuitive, foolproof and sonically satisfying equalisers ever made.Ever since the release of their groundbreaking Virtual Console Collection back in 2011 and Virtual Tape Machines plugin the following year, Slate Digital have been working hard on bridging the gap between analog and digital. There are several excellent API 550 emulations on the market already, but Slate’s take on this most coveted of signal processors really is something special, thanks in large part to the continuous knobs and the luxurious saturation it brings to the party. And the continuous knob movement is so useful that we’d prefer it to be the default, rather than a ‘modified’ option, although we can fully understand Slate wanting to respect the hardware blueprint. Thanks to its proportional Q design, FG-A is just as at home zooming in on a snare drum or problem vocal frequency as it is gently boosting the bottom end of a mix.
No matter how much gain you pile on, those high frequencies hold that characteristic sheen and airiness together beautifully. Slate also boast that FG-A’s high band can be pushed to extreme levels without harshness or distortion, and we can confirm that this is indeed the case. This adds another dimension to the sound, thickening transients and generally warming things up a bit. The Opamp button activates a modelled simulation of the original 550’s discrete 2520 op amps and transformers, working analogue saturation into the signal, pre or post EQ, depending on the settings of individual bands, and even - so they say - between adjacent bands. We wish said modules could be loaded as self-contained plugins, too, however.
VMR 2 itself doesn’t offer any meaningful functionality beyond the ability to save out effects chains as presets, and the hooking up of host automation assignments, but the exceptional quality of the modules make it without doubt one of the most compelling ‘in the box’ mixing tools around. You can buy modules individually or, alternatively, ‘unlock’ the whole lot with an All Access subscription. This is a modular channel strip plugin (VST/AU/AAX), graphically referencing the API 500 ‘lunchbox’ format, in which up to eight modules from a regularly expanding range of analogue-style compressors, EQs and other processors - including the superb Virtual Console and Virtual Tube Collections - are chained in series. FG-A is deployed as a module within Slate Digital’s Virtual Mix Rack 2.