Sonic Timeworks Plug-ins
In the excitement over the upcoming SONAR 2 release from Cakewalk, and it’s inclusion of the Sonic Timeworks Compressor X and their V1 Equalizer in the SONAR XL package, I thought I’d download the fourteen-day demos and give them a whirl. I had recently tracked vocals for a song I was mixing by our guitarist Ant Graham’s side project, NOISE 626. The song, called “Forgetful” is available for download on our music page. What follows are my impressions of these plug-ins derived from using them extensively on this song.
The first thing you notice when booting up Compressor X is its appearance. It’s got a deep red color, and a great big, beautiful VU meter. In fact it looks like any one of the outboard devices with the “Focusrite” logo across the top. Unfortunately, the color made it a little difficult to read the legends on my monitor, as my resolution is set quite high. Yes, I know, I need a bigger monitor! There are the expected controls: input gain, output level, threshold, and ratio. There’s a switch for choosing RMS or PEAK style compression. There’s a switch to activate the “brick wall” limiting, a button for “auto” release, and of course, attack and release sliders. You can tell it what you want to see displayed on the VU meter; input, output, or gain reduction. You can also turn the meter off to save CPU cycles.
I first put the Compressor X in the vocal FX bin of SONAR, and applied no small amount of compression to Ant’s vocals. He’s a dynamic singer, and plays the microphone quite a bit, so I treated him fairly mercilessly. Compressor X came out flying. Maybe I was expecting something a little more subtle, like the Waves C1, but what I got was a good, old-fashioned, warm hardware-type of compression. It’s exactly what the song called for. It didn’t just tame the dynamics; it beat them into submission. That's supposed to be a compliment. After that, I just had to try it on the drums! I slammed the input pretty hard, and got that tell-tale “pumping” heard on so many rock records. It sounded great! Of course, it was totally out of context in Ant’s atmospheric track, so it didn’t make the final mix, but it was fun to do, nonetheless.
Next up, I tried it on the mastering stage of the project. After getting the mix and EQ’ing it the way I liked (see below), I applied some compression to the full mix. I did this in two passes. For the first, I compressed with a 3:1 ratio, a fast attack, and set the release for “auto”. Compressor X really gave the track a punch. The low end seemed “tighter”, and the vocals settled nicely into the mix. For the next pass, I applied the “brick wall” limiting to get the signal really hot. The overall sound was totally professional, and the sound I’ve paid big bucks to achieve in the pro studio (okay, truth be told, I didn’t actually pay big bucks for my last pro mastering session. I traded a MicroMoog for it. That hurts even worse). Compressor X will definitely be my first choice for mastering from now on.
EQUALIZER
V1
Equalizer V1 is a monster of an EQ plug-in with both “clean” and “vintage” modes. I should point out that while Cakewalk’s ads for SONAR 2 XL say they include Sonic Timeworks’ “Mastering EQ”, it’s the V1 showing in all of the screenshots and described in the ad content. There is a “Mastering Compressor” from Sonic Timeworks, but it’s another beast altogether.
Again the color, kind of a deep, slate-blue, makes the legends difficult to read on a small monitor. This rendered the “standard” display mode (the one with a slider for each band) almost unbearable to use. Fortunately, I prefer to work in “graphic” mode (where the EQ’ing is done by clicking and dragging a graphical representation of the EQ curve), so it’s not a big issue. The V1 sports everything you’d expect from a good EQ, low and high cut shelves, and six fully parametric bands of EQ to play with. While some offer more bands (Fee Filter, for one. We’ll bring that one up again in a moment), this is certainly enough for just about any mastering job you might need to tackle. There are “reset” and “bypass” buttons, plus buttons for toggling back and forth between “vintage” and “clean” modes. There are two LED type output meters, and a slider for output gain.
I put the V1 to use in the mastering stage on “Forgetful”, and again, I was totally blown away by the character and personality it imparted to the sound. I, of course, used “vintage” mode, ‘cause I’m an old bugger. The EQ curve was the “bell” type of curve seen on the current crop of “retro” Equalizers, and the sound was smooth and warm. If it were not for the total lack of noise, I’d have sworn we’d gone through an analog stage. The bass and kick were brought out nicely, and the top end provided the warm “blossoming” high-end air that was needed. There was some “mud” in the bass guitar recording, and I was able to remove it with a gentle reduction at 400 Hz, without trashing the surrounding frequencies.
Now, I’m no mastering engineer, and one reason I look forward to plug-ins like this is they can sometimes help “fill-the-gaps” in my knowledge. I have used and enjoyed Spectral Design’s excellent Free Filter for my mastering EQ in the past, because it has the capability to “learn” the EQ curve of a recording, and to examine my recordings, then apply the difference. This makes up for my decided lack of knowledge, and I can learn an awful lot in the process by examining the curves of recordings I admire. However Free Filter is really, really clean. Like Waves clean. For most of my projects, which are largely PC based, and very digital, I like the warmth imparted by tube gear and miss the character of a good, high-end hardware equalizer. This is one reason I had my last record professionally mastered. Well, I may just give the next one a try myself! The V1 has the warmth of the analog gear when used in “vintage” mode, and also sports one very useful feature; a realtime 30 band frequency analyzer. This appears at the bottom of the display, and can be used to show incoming or outgoing signals. I imported a song whose mastering sound appeals to me (the re-mastered version of Marillion’s “Assassing”, if you must know), and opened another instance of the V1 in it’s FX bin. I was able to use this to compare the curves of the Marillion song with “Forgetful”, and make the requisite adjustments to match the two. This allowed me to obtain the desired results very quickly and accurately; plus I learned where my track was lacking, and what mistakes I had made in my initial adjustments. A very nice bonus feature, indeed.
Conclusions
There’s a lot going for these plug-ins, and very little to their detriment, other than maybe the murky coloring. I can’t imagine that anyone who prefers the equalizer’s “standard” interface of sliders being able to see the dang thing well enough to use it, but again, my monitor is small, and the resolution is high. That’s a minor quibble in my book, though, when the performance and sound they deliver is so desirable. If I had tried these demos before SONAR 2 XL had been announced, I’d have gladly bought them at list price. As value-added to Cakewalk’s premium flagship package, they give SONAR 2 an edge over some more popular sequencer packages that stick on basic, passable effects to their programs. I’ll take ‘em. Do they come in another color?
