Multiband processing with your favorite VST/AU plugins
Multiband processing opens up a new world of possibilities for creative producers. Traditionally, this has been a technique used by mastering engineers to glue a mix together with purpose-built tools for multiband compression, or to control the stereo width of a complete mix with multiband techniques.
Continue readingAs you’re probably aware, Blue Cat’s PatchWork, MB-7 Mixer, Late Replies and Axiom are able to load third-party plug-ins. But did you know that they also all come with many built-in Blue Cat Audio effects and utility plug-ins? There’s so many of them that they’re almost hard to keep track of. So here’s a walkthrough of what you get.
First—why do we call them “built-in”? Because if you get them as part of these “host-in-the-host” style plug-ins, they can only be used inside of those plug-ins. Which is of course what you would probably do anyway. All of the built-in plug-ins include the standard features that all Blue Cat Audio plug-ins have: they come loaded with presets, support MIDI learn and MIDI program change, Many of them also include tone maps support.
So let’s take a look at what it is you get! Continue reading
Initially designed to navigate presets in 2D and create new guitar amp tones in Destructor and Axiom by morphing between presets (See this tone explorer video for more details), tone maps have now been implemented in several built-in effects that can be found in Axiom, PatchWork, MB-7 Mixer and Late Replies.
Let’s see how this new feature may change your approach to sound design and plug-in control for other types of effects.
Blue Cat’s Axiom, Late Replies, Patchwork & MB-7 Mixer plug-ins all come bundled with a long list of built-in effects, including this unique Reverb plugin. Learn more about its settings, how they influence the sound of the produced reverberation, and get started with some good basic settings for different uses.
The traditional way to manage stereo streams is to use separate left and right channels sources. There is however another way: by recombining these left and right channels, you can actually separate the mid channel (mono or center) from the sides channel (stereo part of the signal).
Processing these recombined mid/side channels instead of the traditional left/right stereo pair is called mid/side processing and it can be very convenient because you can apply different effects to the mono (mid) and stereo (sides) parts of the signal.
Many of our audio plug-ins provide a mid/side option, but how can you use this approach with any third party plug-in? Continue reading
It’s time for the NAMM News of the day: we’ve got updates for our Plug-in hosts today (our plug-ins or standalone applications that can host third party VST, VST3 or Audio Unit plug-ins)! Continue reading
Did you know that you can use automation to control the plug-ins hosted inside Blue Cat’s PatchWork or MB-7 Mixer V3?
The example below uses PatchWork in Pro Tools 12, but the same applies to the MB-7 Mixer multiband plug-in and any host application that supports automation.
The first step is to select the parameters you want to control from the outside, using the Params Map function, as explained in details in the manual:
Mapping parameters of plug-in hosted in PatchWork
Despite all our efforts, sometimes bugs are not caught before the software is released, and this one has an impact on VST3 users on Mac, so we’d like to share more information about it with you, so that you can avoid major problems. If you are on Windows or do not use VST3, you don’t need to read this!
We have noticed a bug on the first release of our VST3 plug-ins that affect the Mac versions: the identifier for the plug-ins (used by host to identify a particular plug-in) were not properly reported to the host on Mac.
The consequence was that the plug-ins inserted in sessions created on Mac would not be reloaded on Windows and vice-versa.
We are now progressively releasing new versions of our plug-ins with a fix for the wrong ID on Mac (see impacted products list below). But this means that older sessions will not reload the new versions of the plug-ins, as they are seen by the host as a different plug-in.
How To Open Old Sessions
So here is a way to open older sessions without losing any plug-in data. You can then migrate these sessions quickly to use the new version of the plug-in so that they are future-proof.
The idea is just to install the old and new versions side by side, so that older sessions are reloaded with the older version of the plug-in (which would be missing otherwise). Renaming the old plug-in before installing the new version will do the trick:
Open the VST3 plug-ins directory
Rename old plug-ins (for example with “Legacy” at the end, but do not change the extension (vst3)
If the plug-in has multiple versions (Synth, Dual, Mono etc.), do not forget to rename them all. Once you are done, install the new version. Both should now be available, side by side:
Side by side installation
You can now open the existing sessions: the “legacy” version of the plug-in will be loaded, keeping the sessions unchanged.
Since you probably do not want to keep both versions side by side forever, you can quickly migrate existing sessions so that they use the new plug-in in the future, instead of the old version:
Open the legacy plug-in in the session and copy its state
Replace the legacy plug-in with the new one and paste the state.
Voila! The old plug-in is replaced by the new one, with the exact same state.
So far, the plug-ins impacted by this change are the Mac VST3 versions of the following plug-ins:
Other VST3 plug-ins that are not listed above still have the Mac-Windows compatibility issue, except for Blue Cat’s Destructor, Late Replies, Axiom and Re-Guitar that were released with the fix from the very first version.
Did you know that with PatchWork V2 and MB-7 Mixer V3 you can save your favorite plug-ins (and their entire configuration) to reload them directly from the plug-in menu?
Here is how you can do it!
Once you have loaded a plug-in and configured it the way you like it, choose Save As from the plug-in menu:
Choose the name that describes the plug-in and its settings properly (in our example we choose “BC Destructor – Clean”, as it is our favorite clean sound with Blue Cat’s Destructor.
Next time you want to load this configuration, just use the Select menu – no need to manually load the plug-in and set it up again:
Tip: you can create sub-folders when saving the file. This lets you keep things organized, as the directory structure is shown in the Select menu.
One more tip: you can save the same plug-in with different settings in a sub-folder. No need to bother with plug-in presets anymore, as you can load them directly from the menu with a single click!
Enjoy!
So Blue Cat’s PatchWork V2 and MB-7 Mixer V3 are now available, but what’s new? Here is the full list of changes for these new versions:
New features for both plug-ins:
– Brand new GUI design, with improved usability and touchscreen support.
– Now supports retina displays on Mac (text and graphs using high resolution).
– Favorite plug-ins and their settings can be saved to be quickly reloaded later from a menu.
– Unused channels for each hosted plug-in can now be muted (instead of default pass-thru).
– Load/save native VST, VST3 or AU preset files.
– Missing VST & VST3 plug-ins are now automatically relocated.
– Presets and parameters menus are now split in sub menus instead of a single list.
– Additional user VST path to locate VST plug-ins is now available.
– Fully compatible with previous versions.
– Changed demo limitations: up to 5 instances allowed, bypass time changed to half a second, and bypass parameter is not affected anymore.
– Dropped support for Windows XP and Mac OS X 10.6 and earlier. Continue reading
