in this video i'm looking at the acustica audio cerise British style channel strip plugin and you
can grab this as a free plug and download until february 14th 2021 i'm zane welcome to audio
tech tv where it's my goal to help you conquer the tech so you can unleash your creativity by
providing easy to follow audio tech tips tutorials and reviews now i've included a
link to the acustica audio website down below so you can easily click down there and grab
this plugin for yourself for free while you can but right now let's jump in and give it a listen
all right before you can download this plugin you must first install
the free aquarius assistant program and this is about a 10 megabyte program
the plugin itself is just over 600 megabytes so it's not a small plugin but the assistant itself
is pretty straightforward to install and then once you have it installed it's very easy to install
and authorize the cerise plugin from within it and you can choose from vst2 vst3 au
and aax plugin formats now let's talk about the plugin itself the acustica audio series plugin
is an emulation of a vintage transformer based channel strip it includes a preamp section an eq
section a compression section plus it also allows you to control the stereo spread a bit
you can use series on vocals drums and pretty much any instrument really acustica audio uses dynamic
impulse responses to create the emulations of hardware units and this is another great plugin
from them it can be a little heavy on system resources so if you have a slower computer
you may want to keep an eye on that but this can take the place of multiple plugins that you might
have loaded onto a track so there is that now let's look at some of the controls of acustica
audio series and you can see you have four main sections you have stereo equalizer dynamics and
preamp plus your input and output sections but the main sections are these four in the middle
so the first section is your stereo section and you can see we have the spread knob right here
and the spread control allows you to control the balance between the full mono signal and the side
signal and there's also a button right underneath it that you can toggle on and off and when it's
toggled on you go into spread mode that leaves the mid intact it allows you to only control the
side when you're using the spread knob so let's have a listen to the difference between using
this button and not using it so we'll start with it off and here's what it sounds like
then down here of course you have your pan control for left to right
and you can turn this whole section on and off by using the button at the bottom here
the next section is your equalizer section you have your low shelf your mid and your
high controls and you can choose the frequency in each of these then up here you have your gain
controls for each of those frequencies so you can choose how much you want to take away or add
in those frequencies and then in the center you have these buttons here and what these do
for the low and the high settings it changes the cue control from shelf to peak and then in the mid
it controls how broad or narrow the mid frequency is so when you push it in it makes it more narrow
take it out and it makes it more broad then again you can turn this section on and off by
clicking the button down at the bottom here next is our dynamic section and this is our compressor
so you have your threshold over here so you can set which level the compressor begins to operate
then you have your timing controls and you can see it's fast medium fast medium medium slow
slow or automatic and of course you have a makeup control so you can try to level match
the compressed signal with the uncompressed signal you have your ratio control down here
your filter and you have a dry wet knob to control how much of the dry or wet which is the compressed
signal you want to go through to the next section and then you also have some buttons down the
center of the dynamic section and this mode right here when you press it the threshold goes away
this puts it into limiter mode and then we have the fst button right under the timing and when you
enable this one it actually speeds up the attack and the release times modifying those times by 70
percent of the original value and then right here you have an interesting button when you push this
in it's the routing button when it's turned on it actually changes the routing so your compressor
will come before the equalizer in the internal routing of it you turn it off and it flows the
way it looks here where it goes equalizer compressor so that's kind of an interesting
button right there and then finally over here we have our preamp section with a couple of controls
and the first one is our high pass filter here you keep it all the way to the left and then it goes
into the bypass mode for the high pass filter and it can go from 20 all the way up to 250. then down
here we have our texture knob and this controls the global boost of the harmonic saturation and
between these two knobs you see this a b button here and that switches it from the standard a
circuit to the b circuit and the standard circuit features more saturation in the lows and mid lows
where the b circuit gives you more saturation in the high mids and the highs now the trim control
all the way over here now it controls the amount of harmonic content of the drive section and the
transformer based output preamp the trim varies the input level from minus 24 db to plus 24 db
and it adjusts the plugin's internal operational level and this is different from a standard input
gain control however the linked output gain stage always ensures that whatever gain change
is introduced at cerise's input the output level is automatically compensated so now let's test out
acustica audio cerise plugin on a few different sources like vocals guitar and some more drums
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thank you so much for watching for audio tech tv i'm zane keep creating and we'll talk soon