Stillwell Audio All Plugins VST v1.52.05

The Neve* 1073 is probably one of the best large-format console channel modules ever made. Punchy, detailed…it was almost impossible to make it sound bad…for its time. Let’s not debate about large chunks of iron and wax/paper versus electrolytic caps…let’s talk about the sheer genius involved in picking the proper EQ frequencies, bandwidths, and slopes. THIS is where 1973 is coming from…not an emulation, but a tribute. Taking the best features and reducing them down to their essence…then making it utterly transparent and smooth. Dial in some high end. No, more than that…c’mon, more. What? Are you afraid of that knob or something…GIVE IT A TWIST, I SAID! Magic. THAT’s what separates the men from the boys in EQs like this…the ability to drop in staggering amounts of smooth, detailed HF boost without shredding eardrums.




How to describe this? Well, I guess we’ll just settle for this: sometimes digital is just TOO perfect. I’m not going to say “sterile” or “lacking soul”, because I’d wind up eating my words sooner or later…but sometimes you just want a little grit…a little dirt…a little imperfection. That’s where Bad Buss Mojo comes in. Bad Buss Mojo allows you to dial in specific tweaks to a virtual mix buss amplifier. Is the + rail a little low? Dial it in…PSU not quite as stiff as it could be? Dial in a bit of knee in the bend. Old-school transistors or even <gasp> tubes? Dial in some nonlinear modulation. It’ll go from “I can’t hear that you’ve done anything, but I like it” all the way up to “Why did you run my mix through a guitar amp?” Highly recommended (the plugin, not running your mix through a guitar amp…)




Event Horizon is a “Peak-Eating Limiter”…huh? Well, maybe a better description is that it’s a clipper with an optional soft-clip circuit. By truncating waveforms short of where the DAC would go into clipping, you can get VERY transparent loudness increases; unlike most limiters, Event Horizon does this with ZERO pumping, ZERO transient or frequency artifacts, and with ZERO latency. Now, it may not let you be louder than the latest “flavor of the month” “mastering” limiter, but within its range of operation, you WILL get an unsurpassed natural sound. Its output is what comes into it…only louder. If you push it too hard, it will tell you in no uncertain terms that this is no longer the right tool for the job. Give it a try…it’s fantastically easy to use, and it sounds great!




Major Tom is not your ordinary compressor, no sir! It was designed with very specific goals in mind, and blew completely past them. We like Major Tom…can you tell? Major Tom is intended to be easy to use: there are no attack and release controls…the values vary depending on the level of the signal relative to its threshold. These values are very finely tuned to make it as musical as possible, without requiring a wall full of gold records to hit the right settings. The attack/release settings are inspired by one of the true “stealth” vintage compressors, the dbx* 160. You may not hear about it much, but you’ve heard it on records time and time again. Musicality: That’s the second key. Major Tom WILL pump, but it should do so in a musical, rhythmic manner. Put it on vocals gently for smoothing…nice. Put it on bass, but don’t go overboard…buttah. Put it on drums and go berserk…SMACKIN’. If you pull lots of gain reduction, it’s going to turn into a savage, funky, living, breathing, pumping instrument of destruction, but use it gently and it will be nice and transparent, adding a subtle gloss to your tracks. Those looking for utterly transparent gain reduction need not apply.




The Rocket is a character audio compressor, singular in its extraordinary speed, responding in mere microseconds to variations in program level. Being in the order of several thousand times faster than most ordinary compressors, we respectfully submit that The Rocket kicks like a mf.
Violation of the laws of physics and digital signal processing remain beyond us at this time, and a single sample at 44.1kHz has a span of 22.6 microseconds. The Rocket’s attack time can be below this level, for absolute certainty that even the very first sample understands that you are its master. Placed on the master bus, The Rocket will effortlessly tame transients almost in the manner of a brickwall limiter.
Discussions of Science and Art are played out within The Rocket ’s ‘Impetus’ circuits, where warmth and aggression exist as DSP, able to take the delicate, musical gain reduction to the extremes of dirty, heavy and slamming rock’n'roll misbehaviour. Aw hell, The Rocket can rock so crank it up!




This is simplicity itself. It will save your drum mixes. Two controls: Attack, and Sustain. I would explain more, but you know…I really don’t have to. Put it on your drum buss. Turn the knobs…you WILL understand, and you will thank me later. Okay, okay…have you ever had a drum performance that was REALLY laying down the groove, but the recorded drum sound just didn’t SNAP? Turn up the attack. Need those ride cymbals to really ring instead of just dying down into the mush? Turn up the sustain. Too much bleed and ring getting into your drum tracks? Turn DOWN the sustain. See? I knew I didn’t really have to explain it to you.




Before convolution reverbs, there were Lexicon, Yamaha, Eventide…hmm. Seems like all the REALLY good reverbs were around way before everybody got the convolution bug. This isn’t a convolution reverb…it’s an algorithmic reverb put together the old-fashioned way…from your basic ones and zeroes. It’s extremely controllable (try changing the room size and damping of your average reverb impulse…doesn’t work, does it?), and very flexible. Separate control over early and late reflections, stereo or mono in (input mix), stereo or mono out (width), flip wet output channels for cross reverb (very cool for panning mono instruments and letting them fill a space without getting overly wet), high-pass filters, gating…it’s all there. This is NOT the reverb you would use to emulate a physical space (that’s what convolution reverbs excel at), but this is a true gem for sweetening tracks with reverb…adding that special shimmer to tracks that you can’t really get any other way.




This is one of those mythical plugins that makes things sound better just by plugging it in. Really. Unlike 1973, which is a very pristine EQ plugin (but a VERY good EQ, all the same), Vibe-EQ is all about color. The more boost or cut you dial in, the more color and funk you get. This may not be your go-to EQ every time, but you’ll wind up using it more often than you’d expect.