Legends remade.
For better or for worse, modern music often just doesn’t sound like our favorite classic hits. That’s true partly because zillions of classic records were recorded on vintage analog hardware with the artifacts, nonlinearities, and tonal imperfections that the digital era tried so very hard to stomp out. Retro Mix Legends takes advantage of Studio One®’s unique Mix Engine FX processing to bring the classic analog sounds of three classic consoles to your modern desktop mix. Mix Engine FX is a proprietary signal-routing technology that affects your music across all Console channels, rather than just in a single channel. These aren’t stereo bus plug-ins; Alpine Desk, Brit Console, and Porta Cassette are able to tap into individual signals from any channel to transform any mix with the State Space Modeled tonality behind the sound of classic albums from the 1970s, '80s, and beyond.
What's a Mix Engine Effect?
Mix Engine FX such as Porta Cassette are unlike traditional VSTs and effects that can only affect one channel or bus at a time. Activating a Mix Engine Effect on any bus in Studio One will automatically affect and cross-process all channels feeding that bus simultaneously. Furthermore, the unique behavior and sonic fingerprint of Porta Cassette is designed via our meticulous State Space Modeling technology, which sees our engineers elbow-deep in vintage circuitry to digitally capture the warmth, nuance, tolerance, and even unpredictability of venerated hardware on a per-component basis. This attention to detail means Mix Engine FX are the most thorough and true-to-life emulations of real analog console behavior, featuring inter-channel crosstalk, noise, and the warmest drive, saturation, and character imaginable.
A perfect impersonation.
Add punchy low end and the smooth warmth of a legendary American recording console to your Studio One experience. Alpine Desk faithfully reproduces the complex sonic textures of one of the world’s most coveted consoles. Enhance your digital productions with a dose of analog spirit via the Drive and Crosstalk controls, which enable a wide range of tonal sculpting, from nuanced to overboard. Drive allows you to hit the Console’s preamps as hard as you’d like, resulting in satisfying saturation and compression, and the three-stage Boost control broadens your sonic pallette even further. The Crosstalk and Noise controls can be used to glue your tracks together so everything sits right where it belongs in your mix. Unique to Alpine Desk is a variable output transformer that lets you switch from a 1:1 to 3:1 gain ratio for higher drive settings and a uniquely dark and warm tonal contour.
Supreme sonic lucidity.
Add the brightness and clarity of two of the most legendary British consoles of the 1980s to your Studio One experience. Brit Console lovingly re-creates the sound behind arguably more platinum-selling records than any other console. Inherent signal noise plays an important role in defining the sonic character of any analog console. The modeled analog noise in Brit Console is different on every channel being processed to make your mixes more cohesive. Brit Console features three Style options: Vintage, Super, and Modern. Vintage offers a bit of top-end roll-off and a smoother character that defined the sound of British pop in the '80s. Enable Super or Modern to switch to a more contemporary dual design for an ultra-clean sound or add a variable harmonic distortion that yields a gentle bass boost—letting you dial in everything from nuanced second- and third-order harmonic saturation to edgy transistor bite. Crank the Boost for more tone color than even the original hardware was capable of.
Add some AAW to your DAW
Porta Cassette faithfully reproduces the smooth, analog, slightly off-kilter lo-fi mojo of the four-track cassette recorders of the 1980s and '90s. Porta Cassette will help you create mixes evocative of everything from YouTube’s lo-fi hip-hop beats, to relax/study, to Springsteen’s Nebraska. Porta Cassette’s Character control functions dramatically differently than that of any other Mix Engine FX. Low settings govern the amount of Console coloration; cranking it up introduces tape wow and flutter.
The unique Pitch control allows you to detune (or uptune) every element of your processed bus. Unlike hardware cassette machines, however, the Pitch control won’t affect your playback tempo, so you will enjoy pitch-shifting without affecting your Song’s tempo.
Build your console collection.
Only Studio One lets you add so many legendary consoles to your studio. Retro Mix Legends plug-ins are available as a standalone purchases or as a bundle, and CTC-1 Pro Console Shaper is also available. All PreSonus Mix Engine FX plug-ins are included in a PreSonus Sphere membership.
They [the plug-ins] are all pretty sick, pretty dope....The Porta Cassette is my favorite…you can’t go wrong with tape.
Basil Barrington, Crossfadr