hey what's going on out there I'm Sean Divine hope you all are doing well in this tutorial
we are going to be building a powerful mastering chain with the SSL Fusion plugins we are going
to do it with one plug-in instance on the master bus this is one of the most requested
features I've heard from those of you who are utilizing the SSL Fusion plugins you want
them laid out in a way that they are in the modules for the actual Hardware which I used
in this master I'm going to show you all those settings we're going to rebuild it here in
the new redesigned version of wave Studio rack 14 which enables you to load third-party
plugins and you're able to save these settings and use them across your favorite Daws let's
take a listen to my mix and we'll build this mastering chain from scratch using all five
SSL Fusion plugins so we'll disable all of the SSL Fusion plugins for now some of you
may notice that I do have ozone 10 the maximizer on the stereo bus and all I'm doing here is
just keeping us below zero true Peak and then just boosting it to give us a competitive
loudness track is by Bubby Galloway it's called X'd Me Out from his new album let's take a
listen and we'll dive in
[Music]
[Music] so that's my mix I exported that with the fusion Hardware all disabled so we're
gonna go back and rebuild all that here in the plugins but just for those of you who
are curious to know the exact settings that I had on the analog Hardware unit I'm going
to show you that really quickly but the the processing that we're going to utilize here
in the plugins and also you find here in the hardware is the Vintage Drive module The Violet
EQ The High Frequency compressor stereo image section as well as the Transformer which now
has a plug-in version as well so we're going to rebuild the settings for all of these here
in studio rack so let's start off with the Violet EQ on the hardware I did not use the
high pass filter but we are going to add a little bit of low end a little bit of high
end I believe I used the 12K notch on the hardware so let's start there I'm going to
go ahead and enable this
[Music]
[Music] so that was just simply One DB at 30 and then about 3 DB at 12K which is what
I did on the hardware and already I mean this is one of the best plug-in eqs I've heard
it does sound a lot like the hardware however just to note as I'm going through this I know
a lot of you want to compare the plugins in terms of the exactness to the hardware are
they both great options absolutely are they the same they're not I've tried tons of high-end
and boosts and plugins and I can just tell you they're not all created equally and this
is a real standout for me moving on to the Vintage Drive module this is one of the most
misunderstood but also the most powerful modules in the fusion hardware and in plug-in form
we get some advantages which I'll talk about in a minute the settings don't translate in
an exact way from Hardware to software with this one specifically you know I tried to
set it on the same density same Drive settings that I had on the hardware which was something
like seven on the drive minimum on density completely different kind of effect or at
least in my experience so we're going to set it just according to our ears and something
that's appropriate here for the plug-in I'm going to slowly bring the drive and the density
up
so we get a big lift now I know a lot of you who are sensitive to game matching it's obviously
louder so if we turn on auto gain this should give you a clearer perspective
[Music]
so even with auto gain on it's very easy to hear it's not just an increase in loudness
you know we get a lot of thickness and we get a lot of power to our mix from that it
just really brings a lot of things forward gives it that punch and that impact that we
need some of that analog character that you find in the hardware module now one thing
I do want to note an advantage here with the plug-in of Vintage Drive I hear a lot of people
talk about the Vintage Drive module and the hardware and it being noisy which it does
have some hiss to it especially when your settings on the drive are dialed in Lower
A lot of times I would find myself like I did here in this actual Master turning the
drive up and then keeping the density down and that can enable you to sort of balance
the noise a little bit and not have it so noticeable but here with the plug-in you don't
have to worry about that at all obviously that analog noise floor is not present when
I'm on the go I utilize the Vintage Drive plug-in you know obviously when I don't have
the hardware and I don't think twice about it it does what I need still and it's a comparable
result all right next up we have the high frequency compressor which is another one
of my favorite modules in the fusion gives you that analog tape kind of roll-off Smooths
out a lot of the top end and so we definitely want to utilize that here so let's go ahead
and turn this on and we'll dial something in
[Music]
[Music] utilizing that listen button it's easy to kind of hone in on some of the brittleness
in the mix some of those cymbals as well as the sibilance and the vocal you want to be
kind of careful with it because you'll notice if I turn the threshold too far up and I bring
the cross over too far down start to get a very dull and boring sort of mix
[Music]
next up we have this stereo image module I think that this is the module and plug-in
form that most closely replicates or emulates the module in the hardware I think it gets
very very close and not to mention with the addition of the shuffle control you can even
more finely tune
this [Music]
[Music] kind of wraps you around in that stereo field really really nice but also not gonna
mess you up in terms of mono compatibility this is a mid-side processing uh tool all
right so finally we have the Transformer plug-in and this is a one button module on the fusion
Hardware you see that in this button here but now they have broken it down into some
different sections here that make it a lot more flexible than the hardware itself and
this is another one that gets really close to replicating and emulating the sound that
you get from the hardware so I'm going to turn this on we're going to turn the amount
and the shine to minimum I am going to turn on low frequency extend it's going to give
you a thicker rounder low end as things come through the Transformer I don't want to lose
a lot of our subs and the space that's in this mix
[Music]
[Music] the shine you don't want to get too heavy-handed with it but it adds just a nice
top-end machine Beyond just what a a normal EQ even the valid EQ if we had that at 20K
this does something different it's very unique and a very powerful one that's been added
to the fusion lineup so we've used all five of the SSL Fusion plugins here I'm gonna go
ahead and just disable everything and then we'll enable it one by one let's listen to
what we have
[Music]
all right y'all so with
that we have built a powerful mastering chain with all of the SSL Fusion plugins within
studio rack 14 which is waves powerful plug-in chainer now allows you to load third-party
VST plugins like the SSL Fusion here and we can utilize them in one plug-in instance we
can also set up powerful macros across all these plugins which I've done here so if you
own the SSL Fusion plugins or you happen to have an SSL complete subscription and you're
an owner of the Divine mastering chains SR presets I will offer this with these macros
already set up as a free download so you can access that in your account I'll also include
the SSL Fusion preset so you can load them as you wish I literally run my mixes through
either the fusion Hardware or at least one of the fusion plugins on every session that
I do so again just having the choice to go back and forth with these is great but now
with Studio rack this is my favorite way to to create chains and set up macros and I can
use these in whatever Daw I want so if I find myself in another Studio I have my Fusion
modules laid out here with all these controls and just very easy to dial in so again I hope
you have fun with them if you have any questions about what we did with the fusion plugins
here or how we loaded everything here in Waves Studio Rack version 14. feel free to leave
a comment below if you learn anything in the video please like subscribe and consider sharing
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