It's not about this plugin, nothing wrong with it, not even with clippers/waveshapers per se, I'm using two (different harmonics), it's just that some of his claims aren't valid.

 

What I meant is this video didn't make me go "oh hell yea I'll use this instead of compressors from now on"

 

Fircomp2 is the cleanest compressor i ever tried in my life. Its so clean and pristine that i'm seriously thinking about being my submixes comp (not on 2buss because i'm in love with the SSL native bus comp 2, clean AF also). I'm using API-2500 on drums (after almost a year of shadow hills) and fairchild on melodic instruments, but all those mentioned bad boys give me so much color that the end result can be a banger or i need to think on another tool because it's just changing the behaviour and intention of my mix. That being said:

I believe it's the truth, going to use clean compressors to give a little more of steroids on my life. My gym workout routine will never be the same after that

 

What a weird video. I thought he was gonna do something more after
Anyways, there's a lot of mind-blowing vids of Melda plugs on their own channel and lately in Chandler Guitar 's

 

Yeah I think it's just a teaser for their production courses.
Chandler does some cool shit, I admit.

 

Plugin VS Hardware :

 

Thing is, a hardware Sta-Level such as from Retro Instruments is a definately colored compressor, no doubt about it, but this LVL 01 plugin is WAY over the top and is a very one dimensional vst one trick pony type of deal. As a seek and destroy machine it certainly works but it can't be utilized subtlety (anyway I couldn't make it do anything close to clean) as I could do it with the SKnote version that I bought maybe five years ago. The video of the hardware vs software highlights the dirt as that's all that the plugin can manage. In my mind It rates a 2/5.

Check out the SKnote, it's mo' better in my opinion.

Viva Italia....



https://www.sknoteaudio.com/wp/index.php/2016/01/11/sta-limit-unique-vintage-tube-compression/

 

As it's advertised as something dirty with more saturation than compression, it does the job it was made for.

But yeah, it would have been nice to have some different levels of processing in the video, but the "AI modeling" is really accurate with this piece of hardware at this fixed level. It doesn't sound "plastic".

I think they used this piece of custom hardware because they had it freely available to do all the tests and captures to create a dataset (it's really extremly time consuming) to feed the deep learning and release a POC. Now that they know how to do it, let's see the next one they'll capture. I think it will more interesting.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Jan 15, 2023

They kinda basically released just one preset for their plugin. The next one needs to be more flexible for sure.