Studio Machina SL-500 "Slammer"!

[StudioMachina]

Today, I submit my debut plugin for your consideration: The SL-500 "Slammer", and the SL-501!



I describe the SL-500 and 501 as multi-band slew rate limiter and parametric saturator. The range of tones that you can coax out of this thing is impressive, but we have been using it mostly for it's ability to add organic depth and body to recorded material (see the soundcloud below).

I was originally planning on selling this piece and making more plugins... Until I discovered that there was already a mind-blowing amount of vst stuff on the interweb. I certainly don't doubt my DSP knowledge, programming, or ideas... But I'd rather be recording, and I'm devoting my free time these days to developing a pc game. However, I will continue to support the SL-5's, and I will remain open for suggestions as well!

Anyway, I'm releasing it as free of charge without limitation, but donations are requested (not required) if you like it and find yourself using it.
My friend (who also helped test it) and I love these plugins, and we use one or the other in just about every project. Even if you don't donate anything, you owe it to yourself to check this thing out.

The download link contains the documentation, which will explain what it is and how it works. Here is a sample of the plug on some drum samples. It starts unprocessed, then the SL-500 kicks in. This repeats 3 times for contrast throughout the sample (Off, on, off on, off, on).

http://soundcloud.com/greg-courson/sl-500-on-drum-samples

Be sure to send me any samples/questions/insisted donations!



Documentation & Free Download Link

VST for Windows (dll)
The plugins are delivered in a standard exe installer or as a zip file at the bottom of the page.
http://www.studiomachina.net/slammer...1%20manual.htm

Greg [Studio Machina]

[grawk]

any chance of a mac version?

[Solar]

Thanx @Greg, welcome on the plugin world and will for sure give this a proper try. Seem that you've put honest work in this release. Lets see how it translate into real context work!

Thanx for sharing,

[StudioMachina]

Thanks, Solar. I hope that it proves itself to be a useful piece for you! My best advice is to play with it and see what kind of stuff you can coax out of it. I use it most commonly to give depth and dimension to tracks where I need it, but you can do all sort of interesting things with it.

grawk, I apologize, but I currently have no plans of investing the time to do a MAC redux. My time is pretty thin these days! If you were so inclined, perhaps you could get it to work in an AU environment with one of those VST->AU wrappers.

[grawk]

The problem is it's an exe, so I don't have any way to extract it...I can use VSTs

[StudioMachina]

Oh, that's good news. Links to the ZIP download have been added to the download page link in the original post. Be sure to share your results!

[PistolP]

Wow. This is truly amazing. I put it on a master bus and after some tweaking it gave everything such a nice coloured distortion as well as loudness. It is a nice addition to Devil Lock, Decaptitator, Saussage Fattener and all the other distortion plugs I have since it can be really different! Good work, mate!

[StudioMachina]

Originally Posted by PistolP

Wow. This is truly amazing. I put it on a master bus and after some tweaking it gave everything such a nice coloured distortion as well as loudness. It is a nice addition to Devil Lock, Decaptitator, Saussage Fattener and all the other distortion plugs I have since it can be really different! Good work, mate!

Thanks a lot! Slammer certainly lends a very unique, and often organic palette of color options. I made the thing, and I still find myself being surprised from time to time by what I can do with it on different sources. I don't really have any experience with any of those plugins, but I do have some other popular coloration tools. I can safely say that the SL-500/501 work quite differently from the ones that I have (and don't use anymore), and certainly offer a lot more versatility as far as what it can accomplish.

Be sure to send me (short) clips of before & after! I'd love to hear how you've used it.

[diogo_c]

Thanks for the effort. This is a nice and unique plug for sure - gonna play more with it and come back with some feedback!

[APHELEON]

nvm

[StudioMachina]

Nevermind what? I don't see anything to ignore.

Has anyone else had some time to tinker around with them? No questions or anything? Comments? According to my bandwidth usage, there have been hundreds of downloads!

Anticipation:

[farjedi]

This is really great man! Bare in mind that I've only quickly loaded it up on random drum samples to see what it could do but none the less I was very happy with how it shaped those somewhat weedy sounds into something with more depth and character.
A/B ing brought a smile to my face, I certainly will be creating some drum sounds with this in the future and putting it through it's paces on other sources.
Thanks for making this available...cheers.

[StudioMachina]

Thanks a lot! Other successful uses aside, giving sources more depth is what it was designed for. When you get the settings right, it almost feels like it's adding another dimension.

Side note, I found some people discussing this plugin somewhere, and people seem to think that it's some sort of compressor, or a limiter. It has no compression or limiting algorithms anywhere inside, the additive slew limiting feed acts more like an expander than any of those. It is perhaps somewhat akin to the concept of adding a slow dynamic mic along side of your (faster) condenser during guitar amp miking, with the potential to be pushed way, way slower, and an EQ to help balance out the inherent (and often desirable) lowering of transient peaks.

Man, I am not great at explaining things. Maybe I will try and get a video together in the near future.

Let me know if you need any ideas/suggestions/help in the meantime, I'd be glad to assist.

[TranscendingM]

I checked this out briefly and off the bat two things:
- In the 500, I'm not sure if the slew rate is doing anything, I could be mistaken.

- Presets don't save, at least not on my end: Sonar 8.5.3 64, Win 7 64

These two plugins are fun to play around with so far and can help with creative shaping. StudioMachina, I wouldn't mind though actually having some kind of limiting built in mimicking high frequency non-linearity and high peak "shaving" resulting from different slew rate settings; in other words getting some of the actual physical changes of slew and corresponding speeds. Also, if the slew rate parameter could react more linearly there would be a bigger range of control which would allow some flexibility in automating subtle tonal changes within a mix. I think these suggestions combined with what it is doing now could be very cool.

[StudioMachina]

The Slew Rate setting won't do anything unless you have the SL Mix knobs turned up. The big Slew Rate knob sets the coefficient, and the 3 mix knobs control how much of that is used in each band; using those is how you have more subtle control over the effect, as you say. I'm not really sure what you mean by "physical changes of slew and corresponding speeds", the effect is pretty dramatic as-is, and offers a tremendous range of tonal options.

As far as the presets, I will look into it and make sure there is nothing that I may have overlooked, but I'm rather sure that it's an issue with the proprietary development environment that I used. I don't want to throw them under the bus, so I'll just sigh for now. SIGH....

[grawk]

While macs can use VSTs they can't use them in dll format, so I'm OOL, unfortunately.

[TranscendingM]

Originally Posted by StudioMachina

The Slew Rate setting won't do anything unless you have the SL Mix knobs turned up. The big Slew Rate knob sets the coefficient, and the 3 mix knobs control how much of that is used in each band; using those is how you have more subtle control over the effect, as you say. I'm not really sure what you mean by "physical changes of slew and corresponding speeds", the effect is pretty dramatic as-is, and offers a tremendous range of tonal options.

As far as the presets, I will look into it and make sure there is nothing that I may have overlooked, but I'm rather sure that it's an issue with the proprietary development environment that I used. I don't want to throw them under the bus, so I'll just sigh for now. SIGH....

Ahh, ok I'll mess around with it more. I definitely haven't put enough time in yet.
Basically I was getting at creating slew value dependent limiting, particularly in the high's. Where 0 slew rate would mean no limiting, and of course all other values equating to a certain amount of limiting depending on that value.
Cool, post your findings about the preset thing.

[Mike Couzzi]

Cool plugIn! I tried it on some heavily compressed program material.It seem to breath some life back into it.
Sounds very clean at minimal settings,and a little goes a long way,so not much needed.The blend knob is pretty important in this case FWIW
Video tutorial probably would help get more people onboard.
Good Luck

[farjedi]

This has become an indispensable tool for me, and is just amazing at fattening sounds up and toneshaping, the saturation is pleasing and sounds organic to my ears and extremely useful.
I like it so much I donated you some money, it's kind of ludicrous to have something this good for nothing, have a few beers on me in exchange

Not to mention this thing is rock solid, no crashing to report at all. Keep developing, if you keep this standard up people will pay you even if the plugin market is overloaded.

Cheers

[johnnynash]

@StudioMachina. Thank you very much for sharing you work! I'll give them a spin allright.

[StudioMachina]

Thanks a lot guys. farjedi, that is the most effusive feedback yet, I'm at least twice as thrilled that you like it so much!

I came up with a fun challenge for those of you with the available free time to help you get acquainted with the software: Mix an entire song with the SL-500 as the sole EQ and dynamics processor, just to see how it turns out. I think you might be surprised with what you can do to impart more body and perceived loudness without killing your dynamic range!

Hopefully in the near future I can work on a screen cap video and share some of my favorite uses for the SLs.

[tulsraeg]

Originally Posted by StudioMachina

Hopefully in the near future I can work on a screen cap video and share some of my favorite uses for the SLs.

Any news on that?

[StudioMachina]

Nope, I was out of the state until just now. Hopefully within a week or two!

[scalawag]

Great plugin!!
It really add something organic to the sound. Well done.
I will test it a little bit more before donating.
Cheers,

[StudioMachina]

It's not an intricate instructional video, but by watching the tweaks, hopefully it will demonstrate how things work. Somewhat.

Playing with the Studio Machina SL-500 - YouTube

After the on-off comparison (of what I had found to be a pleasing sound through my headphones), I start to get ridiculous with the settings!

[scalawag]

Just discovered SL-501 has a bug on Ableton Live 8. It doesn't keep its settings when saving. SL-500 is OK.

[DSK]

Great plugin! Sounds really unique!
I think if you market your products better you can definitely start to sell them.
The quality for payware is there!


@scalawag I can report the same bug here!

Ableton Live 8.2.8

[TranscendingM]

In Sonar 8.5 x64 Win 7 x64, neither one retains settings after closing and reopening a project.

[evosilica]

Very interesting plugin. I didn't have any success with it on the master bus, but i got very interesting results for coloring single tracks or the drumbus (electronic music here). The slew rate limiting on the low band cleans out the lower midrange nicely and the distortion is also very useful.

Will use this a lot in the future. Thanks

Btw. i didn't notice any settings bugs on reaper 4

[StudioMachina]

Thanks guys, I will look into the preset stuff. The oftware that I designed this plug with does seem to impart inexplicable oddities. I can't see a good reason why a preset module would work for some DAWs and not others. However strongly I feel compelled to learn C++ or C# so I can design plugins from the ground up, required learning time is what keeps me from investing further effort in VST plugins. I have a 3 m/o daughter, and a recording space (with attached house!) to renovate.

Regardless, I just got my third donation... Only like 200 dollars to go before I break even for buying the (non-cross platform) software. Haha.
It doesn't matter though, as long as you guys are enjoying it, it was already worth it. Not to mention that I use them routinely!