 This is the pure plate reverb from Universal Audio and it's actually been one of my favourite reverbs for quite some time and yet I've hardly mentioned it on the channel. The reason for that is until recently you actually had to have Universal Audio hardware such as my Apollo X4 in order to run their plugins but that changed and now some of these plugins are available for you to purchase and run on just about any door. They run as VSTs, AUs and AAX plugins. So now I'm a bit more happy to tell you about them because you can go ahead and make use of them yourself. And why is this one of my favourite reverbs? Well, the sound I have to say. I've got it applied here to an acoustic guitar. Let's have a quick listen. For me it's just got a wonderfully natural sound to it okay and although it has a few features which I'm going to talk about as I say it's the sound which won me over with this one. So what are those features? Well we have a low cut that you can see here easily switched on. As you will know if you've watched this channel regularly I always low cut my reverbs so that they don't get too muddy. Although this is nice to have this here you don't have to have an external EQ to do this. We've got pre-delay this just helps to create a little bit of separation in time between the original source and the reverb okay and that helps with separation so that your reverb doesn't sort of mask your original source. And then we have the reverb time here. This is probably the most significant change we'll make with this reverb. You can adjust that by sliding this needle from left to right or you can use these plus and minus buttons or you can grab this little sort of graphic over here and drag that around if that's what floats your boat. Let's put that up pretty high to a long reverb and have a listen. And it's when I stop it yeah you can really hear that really long tail as opposed to where I had it before. Much shorter tail there okay so it's nice and sort of fluid way of adjusting it there. Then we have some bass and treble controls just to shape it and again I've removed quite a lot of the low end out of this okay I just like that sort of high sparkle with my reverb here. A balance control for left and right and then a dry wet mix control and one of the things they have on a lot of these plugins is also a solo button as well so you can create your blend between dry and wet but if you're in a situation where you quickly want to listen to just the wet signal you can put that solo on. Now I've got it on all the time here because I actually have this on a bus and generally when I put reverbs on a bus I have the only the wet sound on the bus and then I blend them with my faders later. Now I've also got this applied to a vocal on this particular track so let me switch over to, let me just find it here, I'll switch over to the reverb which is on the vocal and we'll have a listen to that. I just feel like the sound of that speaks for itself. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. Now that universal audio plugins are available natively I wanted to tell you about what I reckon are the best five of those plugins. Now I've got a bit of a criteria happening here and that is I reckon they should all be kind of noticeable in your mix or make a noticeable difference. Some of their other plugins are very very good but they're really quite subtle especially if you're just starting out with mixing. Now something which is not going to be very subtle later on in the video is my segue to the sponsor of this video who is not universal audio but DistroKid. If you follow the VIP link in the description down below you'll get 7% off an already amazing price to distribute your music. Now we're going to start off having said all of that about subtleness with a plugin which is probably the most subtle out of the five. As obvious as it is I just couldn't help but include an LA2A compressor and of course universal audio actually make the hardware version of this plugin. Now it comes in three different flavours, I'm using the silver one here, there's also the grey one and just the regular LA2A. There's a few subtle differences between the three but it mainly comes down to timing okay like attack and release. This is the fastest of the three and I generally end up using this a lot more than the other two. Now one of the things I want to tell you about this if you're new to kind of compression at all this is possibly the easiest of all compressors to use because there's only really one knob that you use a lot of the time, this peak reduction knob. I've made a video concerning this, you can follow the link for it just here where I talk about using this with vocal compression and that's what we're going to do with it now. I'm going to play this vocal part in the mix and I'm going to sort of turn this off and on so that you can hear the difference it makes which is fairly subtle and we're going to listen to a reasonably long passage just to give you a chance here to really absorb what you're hearing. Let's start off with it off and you'll see me switch it down here when I switch it on. If you can't hear it go back and have another listen it's reasonably subtle but what I'm hearing with it is not just that we're getting a little bit more presence through the compression but we're just getting a little bit more richness and a little bit more sparkle to it as well. It's very subtle but I really love what it's doing to that vocal there. Regulars to the channel will know I'm not much of a keyboard player you won't see any finger gymnastics here. However even if you're not much of a player you can still use piano, synth and organ sounds to add texture and color to your music. One of my favorite types of sounds to use is a B3 organ and Universal Audio have made this wonderful waterfall B3. Now I've made a little demo of this with the piece of music we were listening to earlier just so you can hear how it adds a little something to what was essentially a guitar part with a few strings. Now before we listen to it and when we are listening to it I want you to see how I'm not only just playing the notes but also adjusting some of the controls here so I'll be adjusting some of the draw bars to change the sound. You'll see me using the swirl pedal quite a lot to change the dynamics and you'll also see me switching the speed of the rotary speaker. We'll talk about the rotary speaker later. Let's just have a listen to this wonderful B3 organ played very simply. So I was as I say moving a few things around there just to change the sound it sort of came in two halves that organ playing there in terms of the style of the sound. So we saw the draw bars moving, we saw the swirl pedal moving etc. But let's take a look at that rotary speaker. So if we switch at the top to rotary we can see that we're playing through a rotary speaker as they were and we've also got a fair amount of control over the sound here by being able to change the actual microphones that we're using the mic position all of that kind of stuff which we can just adapt this so we can adapt this sound and just make it our own. Also this I was using a sort of a fairly tame version of the sound there but you can make this sort of really gritty by using the power amplifier section as well just push that up there and just play a chord. Okay probably not grittier now let's just really push it up. Get the idea there lots of detail in this plug-in and that's why I love using it. I have to admit I've used the B3 sound quite a lot in my previous releases and when I have released my music I've used DistroKid. Now one of the great features they have is the Hyperfollow feature check it out. This is the Hyperfollow page for one of my EPs Wonderland. When people visit this web page they can choose for themselves which one of these great platforms they want to listen to my music on but I didn't have to create this page. It was generated automatically for me when I uploaded my EP to DistroKid. If we visit my DistroKid page here and look at this EP and scroll down you can see the section just at the bottom here where they supply the link for me to share. Now I can share that on places like Facebook where they will automatically be generated my album artwork and people can just click on this and go straight to that hyperlink page. Now this is all included with the base price of DistroKid which is just $19.99 per year. If you follow the link in the description you'll get 7% off of that already great price. Now although I do love that plate reverb that we had at the beginning of this video for many years now I've been a fan of the sound of the halls the large halls with the lexicon reverbs. Okay so it's really nice to see this in plug-in format here with the lexicon 224. Now I would love to be able to pretend that when I use this I twiddle with all the sliders and buttons here to tweak the sound that I really want but I have to say for me personally most of the time I do select that large hall I don't do much else and I just blend it in on a bus and I just really like the sound that we get. I've applied it to the vocal here have a listen. Let's just quickly solo that vocal so you can more clearly hear the reverb sound. It's just the tail of the that reverb that I appreciate so much however you don't have to be like me and just go for that. You can fiddle and tweak to get a really nice sound out of this in different ways with very different styles. There's eight preset reverbs which you can use as starting points and then adapt and then there's also a chorus if you hold shift and select one of these. There's a chorus effect in there as well. You can further go ahead and tweak things here. If you click on this open you've got some more tweaking that you can do of the sounds up here and interestingly they've even faithfully produced this so wonderfully that they've included the bugs which were in the original units. You can actually switch those bugs off by clicking on the UAD logo at the top there. Eagle-eyed regular viewers to this channel will have noticed I'm using a different microphone than my usual one. Honestly this video is not sponsored by Universal Audio, they don't even know I'm making it. However this is another product made by Universal Audio, the SD-1 dynamic microphone. Let me know in the comments down below if you can hear any differences between this and my regular microphone. Talking about things that Universal Audio make, they also make one of the other really famous compressors of all time, the 1176 and thankfully they also make it in plug-in version. This is my fifth pick. I normally use this version of it, the blackface version, but there's also the blue stripe version and I think it's called the anniversary or the 40th anniversary edition. They're all subtly different. Again probably the most notable difference with this anniversary edition is that we have a two-to-one ratio which is not available on the others, but I'm more often than not end up using the blackface. Now the reason why you're going to choose an 1176 over an LA2A for compression at times is when you want a little bit more control because there is some control over ratio with this and also attack and release and in particular 1176s have a really fast attack time and fast release time as well. So it's super useful for grabbing transients that spike at the beginning of a sound which you want to control. Probably this song is not the most appropriate example but I've used it anyway and you'll see as I play this vocal you'll see the needle actually quickly reacting to the beginning of each word. So really useful for that amongst other things as well can really add some sort of drive and grit sometimes to certain things. Now just to give some attention to detail one of the things universal audio have included is I think people found out with the original hardware units that you could actually get a specific sound by pushing in all of the ratio buttons at the same time. If you hold shift on the keyboard and do that you can do the same here. I love to see that attention to detail. I use the 1176s in both serial and parallel compression. If you don't know what they are or how you would use them with a vocal I recommend you watch this video right here.