Need to sound like the professionals, but on a tight budget?
Every once in a while, a plugin developer throws us poor bedroom producers a bone. And that's just what the Open Ambience Project has done.
It's taken a mastering process, developed by Bob Katz and sold in plugin form for $990.00, and recreated it in a free VST.
The effect is a "Stereo Haas Effect Ping Pong Inverter" or SHEPPI.
"What SHEPPi describes is this. You set up a ping-pong delay with feedback of around 30mS, which is the sweet spot for the well-known Haas stereo widening effect. Then, in one of the crossfeed delay lines you put an inverter such that the artificial early reflections are bouncing around out of phase (exaggerating the wideness) and out of time with each other. Bob adds some extra control over this effect by determining whether the delay feedback ("Deep" switch) or single-channel crossfeed inverter ("Wide" switch) should be on or off. In addition, the K-Stereo process adds a couple of convenience touches easily simulated with other tools: an M/S matrix processor (also known as a "shuffler") preceding the effect, and a post-effect EQ module for tailoring the synthetic reflections."
In A/B tests the difference between the uber-expensive plug and the freebie are negligible.
The Open Ambience Project created their plugin out of a sense of fairness, saying Mr Katz has no right claiming ownership of processes which are standard practice in most major studios.
"Bob basically took a few mixing concepts already in use (these would include early reflections, ping pong delay, M/S processing and the precedence, or Haas effect), applied them all at once and took out a patent on it - while conveniently sidestepping everything that looked like prior art."
Read more, hear the A/Bs and download the plugin here.
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