DAN AGOSTO: Hi there gearheads. You’re listening to an instructional screencast on Gearwire.Com and you’re also seeing it. And if you are in fact seeing it, what you are seeing is the UAD Neve 88RS. And what this is, it’s a channel strip from a Neve board basically put inside a box and it’s available in the Nevana set from UAD. It comes with two cards and all the Neve plugins you can your hands on from UAD. This is a new plugin.

I do have two DSP cards in the computer but I’ve used the Nevana. I purchased this separately which you can do on their UAD web site, and I like this plugin. It doesn’t take up too much of the DSP resources of the card.

In this -- In this particular video, we’re just gonna be taking a feature overview, and the sample we’d be putting through we’ve been using on some of the other UAD videos we’ve been doing and it’s just a not overly loud, not overly compressed section of a band practice that I had in my studio and I recorded. So, let’s give it a listen. Right now, it’s powered off in the GUI so we’ll hear what it sounds like. And again, what I do, what I like to do is show you what the plugin does when you bring it up, when you first open it. So, let’s take a listen to our dry signal.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING A TRACK IN CAKEWALK SONAR]

Hope you’re not getting to tired of this sample yet, and now I’m going to power on and see what happens.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING A TRACK THROUGH THE UAD NEVE 88RS]

So, when you first open it up, kind of a bummer at least in Sonar. The output is down 20 dB.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING A TRACK THROUGH THE UAD NEVE 88RS]

When we turn it up, I mean we hear a little bit -- Let’s turn it off. It might be subtle and it might be my mind playing tricks on me but I hear a little something going on over there. So anyway, of course the output knob, very important when dealing with this plugin. One other thing I don't like when you open up this plugin first of all -- Let’s say let’s turn on the equalizer.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING A TRACK THROUGH THE UAD NEVE 88RS]

So, that’s what happens. You have to zero out the board basically, which is kind of it brings you back if you’ve ever worked inside of a studio, but not exactly something I would like. Just all the gain knobs for each band are turned all the way down. And of course you could set up your own blank preset and do that but I don’t really have time for stuff like that. I’m fine with just zeroing it out.

So anyway, let’s take a look at some of the features. It’s got the gate. You probably wouldn’t use gate on program material but I’m going to go ahead and do it anyway.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING A TRACK THROUGH THE UAD NEVE 88RS]

So that’s the gate for you. It has an expansion setting, so it’s not exactly gating. Hysteresis, I’m not totally clear in what’s that doing. I believe what it does is it makes the release faster or the threshold is actually higher on the attack and then it’s lower when it releases. So, as you can hear, when I turn it down it becomes.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING A TRACK THROUGH THE UAD NEVE 88RS]

The threshold is lower so I have to turn it up, but we hear how the attack and release settings happen, and we turn up the history so it actually lowers the threshold on attacks and raises it on the release. Of course, raise the release time here so we don’t get any of that happening. Of course, that’s not something you’d use this plugin for on a program material situation.

So, I’m going to try the compressor and just play around with it. Once again, this is just our overview video. I’m going to turn the ratio up to get anything happening, release, try out the auto setting. It goes all the way up, auto release, classic sound. Just click that on and off.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING A TRACK THROUGH THE UAD NEVE 88RS]

I’m just going to get a little meat, get a little fatness. Speaking of fatness, let’s try out the use of low band EQs. Now, when I add EQ, I like to keep the bells big. This is the Q control and it’s set all the way wide so let’s add some 120, and we can hear that’s right where the bass lives. So, if we need more bass or less bass, of course we go down. We might want to raise the Q a little bit.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING A TRACK THROUGH THE UAD NEVE 88RS]

The bass is a little loud in this mix I have to admit. We can use our bottom -- the lowest band, which is down here, we can use that as a bell, so if we want to say check that bu-bump of the kick drum up, it’s right around there. You can also use it as a shelf like if we want to raise both the bass and the kick, so that’s just raising the entire bass range as a shelf EQ.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING A TRACK THROUGH THE UAD NEVE 88RS]

The upper range: Now this is where EQ really pays its dues. I think the EQ is pretty good on here for the upper range. I’m going to go ahead and turn up some, I don't know, 8, 7 or 8k, get some sizzle on that hi-hat, a little more attack on the guitars, not to awful. But yeah, so for EQs, the high end is really where you find out if it’s worth its muscle. And actually you know what, that’s not that bad. I kind of like that.

One thing we can do, we got too much bass for example that’s subsonic.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING A TRACK THROUGH THE UAD NEVE 88RS]

That’s the low filter -- low cut filter or high pass filter, whatever you like or prefer to call it. So from there we can start to eat up some of the subsonic nonsense that doesn’t really affect us. You can also create like a band pass filter.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING A TRACK THROUGH THE UAD NEVE 88RS]

That’s using the high cut filter as well. Turn those off. It lets you side chain the EQ. So, let’s say we’re doing some crazy additive EQ over here, you’re going to see the ratio go up over here. If I turn that up...,

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING A TRACK THROUGH THE UAD NEVE 88RS]

...there’s more. That’s quite a difference right there.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING A TRACK THROUGH THE UAD NEVE 88RS]

So basically, what that’s doing is whatever the EQ is adding, it’s side chaining to the dynamics section and you can use that for de-essing and other weird stuff. What I like to do is put the equalizer before the dynamics in the signal chain. You can sort of cause some more extreme effects with the dynamics that way. Also phase flop for you sticklers out there, polarity switch.

So, that’s the basic overview of the Neve 88RS. It’s a fine plugin. You can put it -- There’s -- You can put it across just about every track. Say you have like 16 tracks, you can put it across every track and all of the sudden you have sort of a virtual Neve board at your fingertips, which is I think the strongest suit for this plugin. It uses a lot less of the DSP than its predecessors such as the Neve Mastering Compressor which will eat up about one full card almost worth of CPU. So, definitely check this out if you’ve got a UAD card. And if not, check out the Nevana. It might be cool. Thanks for --