While I’m not going to go into a ton of detail on the individual usage of each plugin, the general idea is as follows: choose the console and tape type you’d like to use, then play around with how hard you’d like to hit/saturate said console or tape via the drive and/or linked in/out knobs. In my book, VCC and VTM were the plugins which really sparked the “emulation revolution.” This was the first time that mixers were really convinced with the results, without feeling like there was a huge compromise to be made on CPU usage or latency. While audio gear and plugin manufacturing in the 90s and 2000s was all about trying to make things sound as “clean” and “flat” as possible, by the time we actually achieved the goal of “digital perfection,” we realized that the end results were, quite frankly, a bit dull and boring.Įver since, software engineers have been painstakingly trying to recreate all of the subtle imperfections, abnormalities, artifacts and distortion characteristics of analog gear in the digital realm with the end goal of merging the best of both worlds: the user-friendly functionality of digital, and the listener-friendly sound of analog. So I’ve decided to bundle them together for the sake of this article.

While these are two separate plugins, in my mind, they’ve always been an inseparable pair when looking to impart “the sound of analog” onto a clean, “digital” mix.

Virtual Console Collection + Virtual Tape Machines On that note, let’s take a look at 5 Slate Digital plugins which every mix engineer should own: 1. While audio plugin technology has come leaps and bounds in the last 10 years, the fact that I’m still using both of these plugins in every single mix I do says a lot about their quality. It’s gotten to the point that nowadays, their emulations are “virtually” (get it?) indistinguishable from the real thing. Ever since the release of their groundbreaking Virtual Console Collection back in 2011 and Virtual Tape Machines plugin the following year, Slate Digital have been working hard on bridging the gap between analog and digital.

Slate virtual mix rack vcc