 Nirvana, Metallica, Fleetwood Mac and Tom Petty are just some of the names associated with the famous Sound City Studios in LA and now Universal Audio brings this studio to your door. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. Universal Audio have just released this Sound City Studios plugin so that you can get a flavour of this famous part in music history in your own recordings and the great news is they've released it as a native plugin meaning that you don't need any special equipment you don't need Universal Audio hardware to run it you can run it in most popular doors it's super simple and super fun to use so let's dive in and take a look. So when you first load up this plugin you're greeted with this view of the studio you can see there's some drums in the middle there surrounded by some gobos and then we have various microphones scattered around as well and your basic configuration here depends on what you select as the source at the top so if for example I was going to be using this with acoustic guitar I might go up to acoustic and then to live here and you can see that those gobos have been moved out of the way and we've got some different microphones set up in different positions here likewise if we go to acoustic and then down to piano we can see another setup where the piano is set up in the corner again with some different suitable microphones for that kind of setup likewise we'll go to drums and corner here and we've got a corner setup for the drums as well so all of these are going to pretty drastically change the basic sound now once you've got your setup then you can refine it further by first of all moving some of these microphones around so I can move these ones backwards and forwards I can move these ones forward and inward the ones over the drum kit I can move up and down like so and then once you've done that you can also select some different microphones to use these are all classic microphones you've got a choice of here so let's change this for example to C112 and we can see for example on the C112 that we've also got a different choice of polar patterns here yeah so that's going to depend on the capabilities of the microphone that you have chosen so that's the basic kind of room setup then you can also change the gear that all of this goes through so if we open this panel over here we've got our basic mixer here we can blend the different microphones together we can also actually change things like the distance in from within the mixer as well if you prefer to do that and then we've got things like high and low pass filters phase reverse or all that all of that kind of stuff there for a basic mix then we can go through some outboard gears so we've got a choice of equalizer some dynamics processing there which we'll look at later and also a chamber effect or a reverb effect there as well and you can change the order of this outboard gear if you wish as well and lastly I want to mention that there's two basic modes that we can work in so we've got the re-mic mode which we're in at the moment essentially this is just like plugging your microphone into the whole system if you like and the sound of your original sound gets completely replaced but we've also got reverb mode which is intended for you to blend the sound of the sound city studios with your original source so with all of that said let's put this to the test with a few different sources so I've gone for a very basic setup to begin with for this acoustic guitar with one single microphone in the middle there and a couple of gobos but before we listen to this let's just have a quick listen to the acoustic guitar with the plug-in bypass then I'll switch it on now I want to warn you things are going to get a little bit worse before they get better as I play with this have a listen to this guitar okay that single C12 microphone in the middle there's got too much of a sort of a low-fi quality for my liking so I'm going to switch over to a pair of C414 these AKGs here we can adjust the height on these but have a quick listen to this okay it's starting to sound a little bit more lush now but I want some sort of real ambience and some width to this so I'm going to switch on these Room 2 mics I might leave on the default KM54s there we can just move these around let's have a listen to that so I like the sound of those but I think I'll just adjust the mix a little bit and have those a little lower in the mix cool and I think we'll switch on these U67s as well just out to the sides here this is going to make it sound really nice and wide have a listen I also like the sort of depth that they're adding to the sound there as well it's pretty happy with that maybe a little bit lower again in the mix and then I may go ahead and actually start changing a couple of basics over here I think I'll do a low pass filter on these two microphones have a listen okay not bad and then I may do some processing over here perhaps a little bit of a high-end boost and the really high end to add a little bit of air I don't mind that I don't know that I need any dynamics processing on this I'll switch that off let's go for a little bit of a chamber effect here so we'll blend that in so let's compare what our result is to the original we'll start off bypassed so I really like that it's really put it in a nice space for me there I mean it depends on what you want of course but I'm really loving the results there let's have some fun with some drums I've got a very dry kit set up for this one have a listen so all the room mics and overheads and everything taken out let's just have a listen with the basic C414 set up there as the overheads have a listen we'll add in some room okay I've got something going on there by the way I'm using this in mix mode this time so if I go over to the mixer I can actually adjust the blend between the dry and the wet drums so dry nice I might use a little bit of EQ bring that snare out there a little bit some dynamics it's set to let's move this over to an 1176 setting and see how that goes nice so you can see that you can really play around with so many different parameters there it really depends on the sound that you want to get but it definitely adds some room life to that really dry kit there so on this occasion I'm working with a group of backing vocals or harmony vocals I've already got a pair of C414 set up let's just have a listen to what I've got so far okay so let's bring in a room mic here so I'll switch these on we'll get a bit of width here okay it's not too bad now I'm using the plugin in reverb mode this time which means I can go across to my mixer over here and use this mix control so I'm just going to blend in some of the original vocals that's pretty nice but I think I'll go for some extra width here with these room mics let's just have a quick listen to the original without the plugin switched on sounded like this so let me know what you think about this plugin in the comments down below I'd love to hear from you there and if you'd like to know what my top five uad native plugins are check out this video right here