I then used the PE 1C to ‘exaggerate’ the highs anywhere from 4-8kHz, and maybe even a little 100Hz push. Being able to pull out the horrible midrange of your liking with the mid-band, and add a little low-mid punch, and high-mid punch, all with the ME 1B, is great. On the snare track is where the beauty of having all of these pieces together really starts to become apparent. The PE 1C portion sounded killer on a kick drum with liberal amounts of 60Hz boost and cut (I actually deviated a little from the standard ‘Pultec trick’ by not cutting as much as I’m boosting) and fairly heavy on the 8kHz or 10kHz boost (again, with the bandwidth around 7 or so). In the hardware there is something about the way the high end rolls away that sounds very pleasing to me, and Softube seems to have captured that here in the digital domain. As opposed to a lot of gear/plug-ins, I kept coming back to the idea that a little goes a long way on this particular piece.ĭrums: Another place that I find Tube-Tech gear to shine, is on kick and snare, so I was excited to see if the same would be true for Softube’s plug-in. I’ll do some more global bypassing comparisons, and possibly back some settings down a tiny bit. I tend to lean towards lower levels of compression with the CL-1B maybe just somewhere between 1-3 db.Īt this point, I gave the “compressor before EQ”/”EQ before compressor” switch a couple flicks to see which I like better (a nice touch, rather than having to go and change patches around in the middle of a mix).

I usually start with the default-medium attack and release times, and just bring the threshold up till I get the reduction I want. Then, just cos’ it’s there, I’ll pop on a little light compression. But my favorite thing to do is yank all the mids out around 7 or 8, sweep through a couple frequencies, and when I hear something that ‘could’ be useful, back the attenuation way down to like 2, and then A/B it in and out a few times to see if I like what it’s doing. With the ME 1B midrange EQ, I tend to leave the high mids and low mids alone unless there is something specific I feel I’m not getting from the PE 1C.

Softube cl1b review