Is anyone still using Slate Digital VTC/VBC and VCC?

They work ok on some sources but they really hurt more then they do good. I can recall when they came out and everyone started having mushy oversaturated mixes that we all thought had "vibe" and sounded analogue haha.. Took a few years for me to realize that everything sounded better when VCC was bypassed 🙈

There are allot better plugins today. I tend to use multiband saturation plugins today because I don't want to saturate the bass and lowmids. For console emulations I really enjoyed the Softube console 1 plugins when I owned the HW.

Tape:
Slate VCC and VTM are good and can sound great on the right mix but it sounds plastic to terrible for metal when pushed. Warm mush when hit hot. Unfortunate most Slate Metal is mushy and has ice picky transients. This can sound really good on softer material that Slate is not really marketed to.

U-he Satin is still the king. I love it. The high frequency saturation is nice on the vintage tape and the emulation of bias tone a there. Pick a preset and get to work. Turn down the noise if you must. Do not adjust the meter control. It does not change the distortion, only the meter. Gainstage appropriately.

Chow Tape is a great lofi tape deck. It models a Sony TC-260. You’ll have to configure it to not sound bad.

UAD tape can be cool but It sounds more like a distortion effect. Same with the Crane Song Phoenix, Flywheel, Softube Tape, Goodhertz Tupe tape portion (I love how smooth and easy it is to set though. No stupid spinning wheels gui), and Kramer Tape does some cool things but just sounds like a Waves plugin ugh. A lot of the other ones can sound really cool.

IK is the new hype but it is just fir convolution mixed with a heavy distortion effect and some crazy fluttery tape transport emulation. The transients on the IK Tape plugs are really bad.

Fuse TCS-68 kills IK Tascam portastudio imo but the ik is more of a pure shitbox and it ruins your drums with the IK convolution pre-ringing that’s like MP3 ghosting bad. The Fuse has to be stacked up to realize the “lo-fi” shit in a cool way effect.

Console:
Most console emulations are just soft clipper into a hard clipper. Gross. That’s not really how analog gear with lots of non-linearities and each amplification stage having it’s own distortion, hysteresis from transformers, etc. most hard clipping in gear is the power supply running out of current. Voltage might allow overshoots but also might clip in a weird way that’s not a brick wall or have crazy oscillations. How many plugs sound like power sag? Or how horrible analog clipping cheap gear can sound? That’s not how good gear really works. Most good high headroom gear will overload your typical wimpy “good analog to digital converter” when pushed.

Some that aren’t are VCC, some UAD (Helios!) , Klanghelm SDDR2 Desk, Softube British class a (I hate the American class A), Goodherz Tupe, Variety of Sound, Fuse TCS-68, the PSP Infinistrip pres, etc. I hate the Lindells and the bx_consoles. The Focusrite is the coolest one but the top end clarity of old Focusrite gear is totally gone. It sounds more like some warm lofi. Also the SSL Native channel strips are pretty much the same dsp as the ancient duende plugs which were based off their old digital consoles.

Here’s another one that is total trash: McDSP analog channel. Incredibly gross imd, aliasing, and it produces buildup near DC. Nasty. And you have to set attack and release. Wut? Maybe this was cool in like 2005 but now? No way.

Bus compression:
ITB mostly sucks for this. Almost all plugin compressors have to have slow attack so lots of gross unnecessary overshoots and the multi stage releases pretty much don’t work right on most plugs meaning you can’t dig in.

VBC had cool distortion but the compression part sucks.

I can recommend The Glue with 8-16x oversampling, Presswerk bus view hq on, Molot GE set to not be a pumpy piece of shit on Insane, Faraday Limiter, Kotelnikov digging in (you can’t hit this like a wuss for 1-db off. you need the rms path and the peak path to be active), MJUC, PSP Oldtimer with the distortion turned down, DDMF Magic Death Eye Stereo (they updated it to not have insane phase shift in the midrange) and I’ve even gotten Oxford Dynamics to work okay if you use it as a soft knee thing into the limiter but it is some old digital bleh that doesn’t hug the material well (why you need to use the limiter to get something multi stage with the compressor soft knee and slow and the limiter faster. Oxford Dynamics will only choose one and never feed the compressor into the limiter!) and operates on the pcm samples.

Dan

also Slate is really cpu heavy and ram for some reason, load the full rack, and doesn’t really sound better than lighter weight plugins like Infinistrip and Softube Console 1 strips and doesn’t have the magic of heavyweight cpu hitters like U-he, Goodhertz, and Pulsar. Slate was just hype a decade ago but I still remember I could run tons and tons of Variety of Sound plugs that really didn’t sound any worse and would freeze Satin and heavy fx sends because they sounded so good.

What does rate mean in this context? I've heard that phrase many times and I don't understand it.

If I rate a plugin, does it mean that I use it?

Hey Doc, perhaps you could try to be more sesquipedalian 

Is that on the gender spectrum?

I still use VTM once on the master. I like what it does. I have but haven't used VBC in a while - I wish their was a GREAT emu of the Red 3. I have VCC but most times think I get enough mojo from either PA AMEK 9099 or EL Big Freq/Arouser (love this combo as a channel strip).

RC tube + cranking the drive(sometimes all the way up) can really help tame a harsh vocal.