 Over at Plugin Boutique this month, there are a whole bunch of bargains from Softube. We can see the prices are great, but how good are the plug-ins? I've put together some demos so you can decide. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. One of the major new releases from Softube is Volume 6, which is their kind of mega bundle if you like, and massive component of Volume 6 is the new amp room. So this serves as a kind of a core part of the demos that I'm about to show you. Let's dive in and take a look. Many of you may recall the old amp room plug-ins looking like this. They were separate products for separate purposes. For example, we've got the vintage amp room on the left over here. You can go through, choose your amp, move mics around, et cetera, et cetera. And on the right hand side, similar thing, but we've got the base amp room product. And they were separate products, separate plug-ins, okay? And indeed, you may recall these products being available as native UAD or Universal Audio Plug-ins, okay? And that's a kind of a testament to their quality because I can tell you that Universal Audio don't just let anyone through with any old plug-ins, okay? Now the new amp room has changed quite a bit. There are still separate products. However, you can combine them all and use them all in this one plug-in. So here we can see the Marshall Suite loaded up. If I go down to the bottom here, I can flick over to the Metal Suite, for example, here or, you know, the Vintage Suite here. And the great thing about this is now you can mix and match the products all in the same interface. So you may, you know, choose an amp here from the Vintage Suite, but you may think, hey, I want, you know, some cabinets from the Marshall Suite. So if you go to the cabinets here, I can just click on this here and choose one of the Marshall Cabinets, just drag and drop it on here. And hey, press so you can, so you can sort of blend all of the different components that are available. We're going to talk in a little bit more detail in a moment about the different components and about how you combine them. But before we do that, I want you to hear the demo and I want to give you a quick explanation of what you're about to hear. The first guitar you're going to hear is my Gretch. And for that, I used a part of the Vintage Suite and I used this amp here, this Pacific Jewel Tremolo 100 Watt. This is the black version. Okay. And this has got a nice natural kind of overdrive sound. So I didn't use any of the pedals for overdrive here. Okay. There's a few pedals in here. I've got a gate, I've got compression and I've got a treble boost, but not using anything for overdrive. Okay. In contrast to that, you'll hear a strap come in or my strap will come in a little bit later and I use this amp. Okay. This is the silver version of the same amp. By itself, it doesn't overdrive all that naturally. It's got a beautiful, beautiful clean tone. Very, very chimie with a strap. But in this case, I used a pedal to really create the overdrive. Okay. This green one here, which has got a very familiar look to it for those of you who know your guitar pedals. So before we dive into this plugin in a little bit more detail, let's just have a quick listen to the first demo. So in the main viewer of this plugin, which is called the Sweet View, S-U-I-T-E, we've got sort of five basic sections. Okay. We'd start off by looking at the amp section, but you can see over here to the left, we've got the pedal section, which also happens to have an EQ in there at the moment. Then to the right of the amp section, we've got the cabinet section. In here, obviously you can swap out your cabs. You can change microphones for your cabinets, move the microphone position like so, etc. This is really great for building a tone, I have to say, using this section. Then you've got your studio effects section where you can apply effects after the amp and cab section. Okay. You can use pedals in here or different effects. And then finally you can see this really, really handy and easy and nice to use EQ here as well. So that is the Sweet View, but there's also the Studio View, and I'll click over to that. And I've got to say, I slightly prefer this view, okay, if you're going for slightly more complex setups, okay. As you can see, you can just sort of move around, you know, and just go into the different parts of the signal chain here, okay. If you want to swap things out, you could, for example, you know, grab this amp here and just drop it on an existing amp and just swap it out like so. You can make more complex sort of routing, I'll grab an amp here and just drag it in between these two cabinet sections, okay. So now you can see we've got a couple of splits there, so we've got a different amp for this cabinet than we have for this cabinet. So I find that this view is just a little bit more sort of versatile in that way. And of course, you've got everything from all of the suites that you own available to you here at the bottom, you can just grab them and drag them on. And if you want to see something in a bit more detail, let's say I want to look at this amp here in the middle in a little bit more detail, I can just double click on that, and it brings up, you know, the sort of detailed view of that amp where I can go in and make adjustments. Now I must admit that for me, I'm more often than not, I'm looking for clean amp sounds or slightly overdriven amp sounds with the styles of music that I play. And that's what you kind of heard in the first demo as well as, and I forgot to mention that I was using some of the bass suite as well. I'd use some of the amps and cabinets from the bass suite. But I know some of you are going to want to hear something a little bit more high gain. I haven't ventured into the metal suite. There's plenty of YouTubers that do that, but I have put together another demo which was largely based upon the Marshall suite. Let's have a listen. So apart from using amp room in the demos, I also used a selection of plugins from the volume six bundle. OK, the first one I used was this one, this opto compressor, which I used on the bass guitar to kind of even out the playing. OK, so that you didn't have certain notes which are just much louder than the other, for example. Now, what they've done here with this is obviously based upon an extremely famous opto compressor. The giveaway is the kind of white color to the front of it, but they've expanded the functionality. The original was very simple in design, just really one knob to control the amount of compression, but they've given you a lot more versatility with this, for example, you've got this timing control over here, which wasn't on the original. You've got this drive control over here on the right, which wasn't on the original. So just allows you to sort of tweak things a little bit more in the same kind of vein. And they also have available this one, which is a FET compressor, again, based upon another really famous compressor from the same company, but giving you some options that were also not available on the original. So for example, on the original, we just had four ratios to choose from, four to one, eight to one, 12 to one and 20 to one. But on this version, you can flick this over to some lower ratios. You can see here one to one, 1.5 to one, two to one, three to one. OK, so if you want to be much more subtle with your compression, you've got that ability there. OK, the other thing that I use that was on the Gretsch guitar in the first demo was this reverb. I really like this. Although they say this is not based upon any particular piece of hardware, I'm going to say it's a little similar to some of the Lexicon reverbs from the 80s. You can get some really nice, especially larger reverb sounds from this. OK, so I use this on the Gretsch guitar at the beginning. I also, in terms of what I used on guitars, use this quite odd little plug-in, which is the acoustic feedback plug-in. So this is designed to emulate those kind of feedback sounds that you'll get from highly overdriven guitars, et cetera. And I used it just to add a little bit of a kind of a scream effect to the strap, which I used in the second demo. Go back and have a listen to that again if you're not sure what I'm talking about. OK, then on my master bus, I use this for as the as a maximizer or limiter. OK, sweet little plug-in to use, quite straightforward to use in many ways. You've got some different styles that you can choose from at the bottom here. And I really actually felt that was quite useful, this Weiss MM1. OK, now, in addition to this particular plug-in on my master bus, I also used another soft tube plug-in, which is called bus processor. You know, you'll hear people talking about plug-ins, which add kind of glue to a mix. Well, this is definitely one of those plug-ins in my opinion. It's called a bus processor. You could use it, say, for example, on a drum bus or some other bus, but you can also use it on your master bus as I've done with this particular mix. Now, before we get into all of the controls with this, I just wanted to do some quick before and after comparisons. OK, so you can just hear what I've been able to achieve with the simple settings I've used here. So let's just listen to the second half of the first demo without this switched on. So it's bypassed at the moment. Let's have a listen and let's switch it on. Let me know in the comments down below what differences you think you could hear there. Now, there's three main parts to this plug-in, and a big part of it is compression. So all of these controls in the middle here are related to compression, the usual controls that you're kind of used to seeing. And there's also some side chain controls here. Related to compression. And you can also use an external side chain as well. And it's nice to see they've got this wet dry knob up here. So you can do some parallel compression with this plug-in. And also just want to note that the ratio goes down to some nice low values as well. So if you want to be super subtle, you know, perhaps that in combination with a soft knee, you can definitely achieve that with this. On the right hand side, we have everything related to saturation. And let's face it, you know, soft tube are very, very well known for their saturation. And I just used it in this example just to add a tiny little bit of sort of grit if you like to it. It's very subtle, but it's just there. And I rather like that. And by the way, you can use this button down here if you want to place the saturation before the compressor in the signal chain. And then finally, at the bottom here, you have these three controls. So you've got this air control, which much like other air controls on other plug-ins and on hardware adds a little bit of sort of top end, you know, in there in a very nice way. Then we've got a simple stereo with control. I love to keep this side of things simple. OK, I just want to make things sound a bit wider, which I've made this sound quite wide. Actually, I've exaggerated the stereo field a little bit. But at the same time, I wanted to make sure the base was in the middle. So I use this control for that, this mono base. So this is just a frequency cut off control. Everything below that frequency is going to be in mono. Overall, what I found with this plug-in is it doesn't take much time to get to know it, and that's nice to see. You can just drop it in on a bus. And I think, you know, within a minute or two, quickly be able to get the kind of results that you are aiming for with it. It's just got enough control to be able to do that. An overall, a beautiful little plug-in, which I'll be using a lot of in the future. As I said in the intro, I've made these demos so that you can make a decision about these plugins. But I'd be fascinated to hear from you in the comments down below. What was your favourite plug-in in today's video? Which one have you got your eye on? Now, don't forget to follow those links in the description down below. There's quite a few bargains from Softube on plug-in boutique at the moment. Some I haven't mentioned in this video. Go ahead and check them out. Thank you so much for joining me today and I'll see you in the next video.