Focusrite now ships their Scarlett, Saffire and Clarett interfaces with Swedishbased Softube’s Time and Tone bundle. Along with Focusrite’s included Red 2 EQ and the Red 3 Compressor plug-ins, Softube’s Time and Tone Pack complete a great set of plug-ins to go with your new Focusrite interface.
Valued at $297 (bought separately), you get the TSAR-1R reverb, Tube Delay, Saturation Knob distortion and the Drawmer S73 IMP or Intelligent Master Processor.
I have been using TSAR-1R to add just the right amount of ambience and spaciousness to otherwise dry recordings—it works easily with a minimal number of parameters to adjust. Tube Delay is like an old analog tape delay echo unit. You can set it anywhere from tight and short flutter echoes all the way to slap back echoes.
Saturation Knob is the answer to “spanky” clean guitar sounds but don’t let that limit your use to only guitars. I add subtle amounts of warmth distortion to main vocal tracks, backing vocals and other instruments.
The S73 IMP models the Drawmer 1973 three-band stereo FET compressor that has collections of presets arranged into three groups of mastering algorithms called Styles.
Free for all newly registered users (after Sept. 1, 2015) of Focusrite’s Scarlett, Saffire and Clarett interfaces, the Softube Time and Tone Bundle is downloadable.
softube.com/index.php?id=news138
BARRY RUDOLPH is a recording engineer/mixer who has worked on over 30 gold and platinum records. He has recorded and/or mixed Lynyrd Skynyrd, Hall & Oates, Pat Benatar, Rod Stewart, the Corrs and more. Barry has his own futuristic music mixing facility and loves teaching audio engineering at Musician’s Institute, Hollywood, CA. He is a lifetime Grammy-voting member of NARAS and a contribut- ing editor for Mix Magazine. barryrudolph.com
