Slate Digital Announces VIRTUAL BUSS COMPRESSORS

[masteringdigital]

Native-instruments/Softtube did a good job with the PREMIUM TUBE SERIES:
PASSIVE EQ with MS mode (manley massive passive)
VARI COMP (manley variable mu)
ENHANCED EQ (MANLEY ENHANCED PULTEC EQP-1A)
Maybe Slate will make it better?
As of today,there is no good emulation of the PULTEC & LA2A
It is time that serious company as "Slate Digital" take this project and give a final solution to all toys that claim to emulate these legendary instruments

[Fabrice Gabriel]

Originally Posted by otobianki74

I'm guessing the power switches on each of the separate compressors will deactivate it and any CPU it pulls. I think you can do that with the compressor stage of the FGX plug as well.

this is awesome. I love their plugins!

oto

Absolutely you will be able to switch on and off each plugin. You'll also be able to drag and drop them to instantly reorganize them !

Originally Posted by bryan k

I like the fact you took multiple characteristics from famous compressors, and combined them to make new unique sounding compressors.

Again, these are not direct replica or models of any one single compressor, but rather takes characteristics from a couple/few and makes a Frankenstein compressor from it, this idea is AWESOME.

That was the idea indeed, taking further analog emulations. We did not want to make exact replicas, but instead get several characteristics and bring some creativity to the sound you can get from these three unique compressors.

Originally Posted by TRW

Auto release on the 4014?

The attack and release behavior on the 4014 are already quite automatic. Most people may not notice it, because it has just been intended to be very transparent, so you can use any setting with any mix, it will always sound transparent.

Originally Posted by The Beatsmith

I assumed that they were 3 separate plugins but they were just put together in the 'rack' for the image, and cos it looks cool...?

This is one plugin with 3 compressors in it ! We found ourselves to be stacking up several compressors for mixbuss compression, using different flavors, and in order to get a creative and good sounding result, we needed to have several units.

Getting all those different sound behaviors in one compressor unit would have been too complicated and less powerful, that's why we feature 3 different units, with 3 different response and warmth behaviors.



Fabrice

[TRW]

Originally Posted by Fabrice Gabriel

The attack and release behavior on the 4014 are already quite automatic. Most people may not notice it, because it has just been intended to be very transparent, so you can use any setting with any mix, it will always sound transparent.

Cool thanks! Love your work so have high expectations!

[Sofa King]

Originally Posted by Fabrice Gabriel

Absolutely you will be able to switch on and off each plugin. You'll also be able to drag and drop them to instantly reorganize them !



That was the idea indeed, taking further analog emulations. We did not want to make exact replicas, but instead get several characteristics and bring some creativity to the sound you can get from these three unique compressors.



The attack and release behavior on the 4014 are already quite automatic. Most people may not notice it, because it has just been intended to be very transparent, so you can use any setting with any mix, it will always sound transparent.



This is one plugin with 3 compressors in it ! We found ourselves to be stacking up several compressors for mixbuss compression, using different flavors, and in order to get a creative and good sounding result, we needed to have several units.

Getting all those different sound behaviors in one compressor unit would have been too complicated and less powerful, that's why we feature 3 different units, with 3 different response and warmth behaviors.



Fabrice

Hi,
Any lead time on this?

best,
Sean

[Johntron512]

Originally Posted by ajbianco

Fab, can i please make a suggestion for your future products. I understand that big knobs and vintage style GUI's help the user feel like they have rich analog gear in their hand.

but for most of us who use a mouse to run these things, why do you persist with round knobs on your GUI's?

round knobs are for turning with your fingers. not for rotating with the mouse pointer. i understand plugin companies want to make their stuff look vintage, but i personally dont care about these visuals. i just care about how the thing sounds.

i would much rather prefer to see sliders or more mouse user friendly controls. this whole analog plugin gui thing is going a bit overboard now.

have a look at ozone 5 and the way they have designed their GUI. you can fit so much power and ease of use in a small space, if you just bight the bullet and stop using knobs.



also, it would be a great help if you actually put RMS VU meters on your plugins. especially for compressors and tape devices. a dynamic range meter which shows the peak level next to the rms level would really help. its lets people understand how much they are squashing their music. its especially useful for any 2 buss or group compression.

i know the whole vintage thing is big now, but its 2012. im sick of looking at old analog gear GUI's. lets more forward people!!!!!!

the industry is saturated with these vintage imitation plugins. im all for keeping the sounds of great analog gear, and using models in plugins to bring that color to the public but why cant we package it in a more modern, efficient and potent interface???????

I definitely enjoy the current designs. I'd say if they were to appease needs like yours, they should just offer a no-graphics mode that's just a row of faders and labels, and some checkboxes. That mode could also have a scalable window to enlarge to any size.

[deadringer971]

Originally Posted by ajbianco

round knobs are for turning with your fingers. not for rotating with the mouse pointer. i understand plugin companies want to make their stuff look vintage, but i personally dont care about these visuals. i just care about how the thing sounds.

Agree and disagree. I love the vintage look, but I hate when a plugin-knob must be turned around with the mouse. If I could just press the knobs and pull up our down, not turn around, it would be better. I think Waves does this. But FabFilter does not.

So keep the knobs, but make it possible to control as it's a fader. Up and down (and left right), not just turn around the knob.

[sigmundfreud33]

i personally think ALL plug-ins should implement the scroll wheel as a pertinent tool in dialing in the 'knobs'.

hate running into plugins when im going scroll wheel crazy who don't support it, haha

[thedigitalgod]

Originally Posted by Johntron512

I definitely enjoy the current designs. I'd say if they were to appease needs like yours, they should just offer a no-graphics mode that's just a row of faders and labels, and some checkboxes. That mode could also have a scalable window to enlarge to any size.

reaper has this option

[Leevi]

Steve is the smartest, coolest and the most handsome developer ever! How much will I get discount from VBC now?

But seriously thinking I can't wait! If this is as good as previous releases, this is gonna rock hard!

[johnnygri]

Originally Posted by thedigitalgod

reaper has this option

And Logic (the 'View' button in top left corner of any plugin window).

[Johnkenn]

My pocket is aflame...

[jrhager84]

Any news on release?

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I777 using Tapatalk

[Macaroni]

It seems obvious they're going to do it at NAMM.

[joe_04_04]

Originally Posted by Macaroni

It seems obvious they're going to do it at NAMM.

That's def. They are already almost 2 months past their original release and namm is right around the corner. Make sense to me.

[Steven Slate]

Perfection comes at a price, and for the vbc, that price is added time. We are working on vbc every day. It will be shown off proudly at NAMM and be available soon.

Cheers,
Steven

[DSK]

Originally Posted by Steven Slate

Perfection comes at a price, and for the vbc, that price is added time. We are working on vbc every day. It will be shown off proudly at NAMM and be available soon.

Cheers,
Steven

Mr Slate with all do respect (for some of your vision, loving VCC on my mixes and all), you have to acknokledge that this early announcements are beneficial to the marketing part of your bussiness.

This is your company's M.O. and saying that you are just about to release something and then perfecting it indefinitely 3 times in a row now!! (VCC,VTM and now VBC) strikes me somewhat peculiar.

This was no leak, no mistake ups "early announcement".

You knew you had 2-3 maybe 4 months of development so decided to "leak it" so it will hype by itself.

This ensures many positive things like hype and anxiousness/excitement, creating a vacuum of purchases from other manufacturers and assuring your (high quality ofc) release will have funds waiting for it before hand, as well as the sensation of "perfecting" the plugin.

I say sensation because seeing the M.O. it strikes me that this "perfecting" might not be entirely true. You can be just waiting to see until the hype reaches it's peak and them BAM "we just finished it"


Anyway on a more positive note I wonder how good this will be..
..it will be good that's for sure but will it be better than the competition? (and by that for me I mean mostly PA's offerings, CL Series, The Glue and Pie)

EDIT: Now I see you annouced it properly before leak so sorry for assuming that... thought I was in the other thread and didn't see this one my bad..
Still the rest is valid
Carry on!

[K-Slash]

Come on guys.

All these complains about dates...

Just be patient, and be glad you're aware that something great is coming, and you have time to start saving for it .

[Andy_bt]

Originally Posted by K-Slash

Just be patient, and be glad you're aware that something great is coming, and you have time to start saving for it .

I hope the intro price is not over yet?!
A.

[PascalVB]

Why complain?
Waves did very interesting sales on their API/SSL/Neve compressors at the end of 2012 and it was very tempting. But I kept my cash, waiting for VBC.

Now of course, you will say: "it proves that the Slate marketing thing is working!", but then again: I'd probably be much less happy having just bought Waves plugins and then out of nowhere seeing VBC being released and then having to dive into my pockets again for something that will probably render the Waves stuff useless.

[barrythave]

Originally Posted by PascalVB

I'd probably be much less happy having just bought Waves plugins and then out of nowhere seeing VBC being released and then having to dive into my pockets again for something that will probably render the Waves stuff useless.

Been there many times

[doom64]

Originally Posted by PascalVB

Why complain?
Waves did very interesting sales on their API/SSL/Neve compressors at the end of 2012 and it was very tempting. But I kept my cash, waiting for VBC.

Now of course, you will say: "it proves that the Slate marketing thing is working!", but then again: I'd probably be much less happy having just bought Waves plugins and then out of nowhere seeing VBC being released and then having to dive into my pockets again for something that will probably render the Waves stuff useless.

Honestly I appreciate what SD does. People dropping products with no hype is really poor business.

What do people in the music industry do? They release a single on the radio a few weeks before the album is released. When McDonald's puts out new food products they only have them "for a limited time only" which incentivizes people to TRY the new menu item out. If it's popular enough then McD's keeps it.

On the streets drug dealers give out free samples to generate hype for their product.

Car dealers let you test drive new vehicles. Movies release trailers MONTHS sometimes a year in advance to generate hype.

Seriously if you are in business and you don't generate hype IN SOME WAY then you are doing it wrong!

You know another thing I don't get? Audio companies that don't bother putting audio samples on their YouTube videos. What? WHAT? I mean I know YouTube quality isn't great but nowadays it's more than passable. Lexicon did this when they put out the PCM Bundle and I thought that was stupid because that plugin sounds gorgeous!

[Pschelfh]

Originally Posted by DSK

I say sensation because seeing the M.O. it strikes me that this "perfecting" might not be entirely true. You can be just waiting to see until the hype reaches it's peak and them BAM "we just finished it"

I don't think so, it would be a bad marketing move not to release a product when it's ready, you want to cash in right after development.

+ By waiting so long, you give other developers the chance to produce similar products, thus reducing your market share. So no, I can't believe the delay is deliberate.

Peter.

[DSK]

Look I didn't say it was good or bad. It's both but mostly good

I think it's good that you know in advance so you won't get i.e. Waves older offerings. Look at the way Lexicon aggresively pushed their products with a huge sale in the light of Exponential's audio release. If Michael wouldn't have announced a month or two in advance then both him and customers would have been missing out.

Originally Posted by Pschelfh

I don't think so, it would be a bad marketing move not to release a product when it's ready, you want to cash in right after development.

+ By waiting so long, you give other developers the chance to produce similar products, thus reducing your market share. So no, I can't believe the delay is deliberate.

Peter.

By waiting strategically you know when your opponent launches his product and can negate his hype by launching yours at the same time.

But I agree keep it too long and it will backfire.

[Gear Geek]

The product was not and is not being delayed it simply isn't finished. Therefore, they should have kept quite about it until it was ready period. Slate can play guessing games all day but he has no idea how long it will take to finish a product so he should just refrain from all these silly "coming soon" guesses. It may be done on purpose to hype the product and create buzz but if it's not, how long does it take to learn your lesson about software development cycles?

[mike1k]

Slate did drop the Chris Lord Alge Drums SSD Expansion product with no previous announcement. Brilliant IMO!!! Great product, great surprise, immediate impulse buy!!!

Either way, it's all top-notch stuff. I do prefer the un-announced product drop (softube successfully does this too) vs. months of hype myself.

[Steven Slate]

Let me put a rest once again to the conspiracy theories.

Tradeshows are expensive. If you are an audio manufacturer and you are exhibiting at a tradeshow like AES, you better show off products and get value for the money spent.

So before this past AES, we had two agendas: One was obviously the RAVEN MTX multi touch DAW controller. The problem we had was for Slate Digital.. we had the VBC in the works, and at the time we felt confident that we could have it done within 30 days. So we showed off the VBC at AES, and had Fabrice discuss analog modeling techniques. We had every intention to finalize the algos and release them in November.

Now, the VBC version we showed at AES sounded great and I was very confident about it. But if you have used a Slate product, you know that great isn't enough to warrant a release. It has to be perfect. So I've been working hard on each of the three compressors to get them there, and it has been far more difficult than I had predicted that it would be.

Every nuance of these compressors has to be spot on to our vision. And it's been very close for the past few weeks, and each new build gets better.

We're sorry for the early announcement, but be aware that there was no strategy behind it.

The VBC will be out soon, and I believe it will live up to the hype, as I hope you'd all think our other products have.

Cheers,
Steven

[mattyc]

Originally Posted by Steven Slate

The VBC will be out soon, and I believe it will live up to the hype, as I hope you'd all think our other products have.

Surely the guy who's selling it saying it lives up to the hype is more hype ?

[Macaroni]

Steven is free to hype it as much as he wants - he's paying for the development.

You can demo it for free and determine if his claims are valid for you. If not, he doesn't get your money. If yes, then it's a win/win.

I don't see a conflict or problem with that. Hype on Steven.

[Category 5]

Originally Posted by mattyc

Surely the guy who's selling it saying it lives up to the hype is more hype ?

You do have to admit he has quite a track record. After all, it's what we're all doing in this thread to begin with.

I am one of the few that believe that eventually the algorithms will make most hardware obsolete except to the collector. Who know how long that will take, but there will come a time where lovers of old hardware are the minority.

For that reason I love being a part of the progression, and companies like UA, Slate, UBK and Relab (there are others too) really make tools that we can use to make really great sounding music now...even though we are only part of the way there. Some will argue we are very far away and a few others will contest we are there now.

I say we are there now in the sense that you can make great music with an interface and software alone. That is, the people that buy music and share it throughout the world will be none the wiser. Sure, the golden ears will hear a difference, especially in side by side comparisons, but blind tests have shown us that even the pros can be fooled much of the time (most ).

Thanks Steven, for taking the extra time to get it as close as the technology allows. We are at a point where modeling techniques and algorithms are better than most people thought they could get, and processing power is cheap and plentiful. Kudos for wanting to take the next leap forward in our art, not just the next leap forward in building your company (even though the former will encourage the latter).

[TranscendingM]

"Hype" has two meanings.

In the case where there is no substance delivered under the verbosity in selling a product, then it is hype.

In the case where a track record speaks for itself - e.g. VTM - then the said hype is merely excitement that instills intimidation into the skeptic.

Why intimidation? Well, one can venture many things such as competition or just merely despising that which is successful.

And why say any of this? Because it is absurd to be crying about a thread! Try the product. If you like, you buy, if not nobody took anything from you.