In practical terms, this has the effect of making things seem a hint more ‘forward’ in the midrange and it can be a lovely, flattering effect. Overviewīefore you start tweaking, it’s worth listening out for the general tonality of Custom Opto, which can be useful even when it’s not compressing: there’s a touch of subtle but pleasing harmonic distortion and a slight EQ curve being applied all the time. As with all Slate’s plug‑ins, you can purchase Custom Opto outright if you prefer, but it is also included in their All Access Pass, a subscription bundle with an impressive and growing range of effects, instruments and sample libraries, which seems to me to offer remarkably good value for money.
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Like FG‑2A, Custom Opto is a module that’s hosted within Slate’s Virtual Mix Rack (VMR), itself a host plug‑in available for Mac and Windows hosts (VST, AU or AAX). If you simply want a great LA‑2A plug‑in, the latter remains, in my view, one of the most convincing around, but Custom Opto opens up so many more possibilities! In answering that question they’ve developed Custom Opto, which joins, rather than replaces, FG‑2A in Slate’s range.
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But in the software world, developers have more scope to tweak things, and Slate recently asked themselves if it might be possible to augment the FG‑2A with new features that would make it more versatile, without sacrificing its overall tube opto vibe. Typically, if when using an LA‑2A you find you want more control, you’d turn to a different sort of compressor altogether or use the LA‑2A along with something else it’s often partnered with an 1176, for example. For instance, it offers very little by way of control over the attack and release timings or ratio. But, while its operational simplicity and relatively relaxed optical compression can be just the ticket in some scenarios, in others they can render it of more limited use. Push the “S” on any module to hear it alone in the signal chain, and hit the “power” button to turn it off.At heart, it models the same hardware as Slate’s FG‑2A, but Custom Opto’s tweaks make it useful on so many more sources!īack in SOS June 2021, I reviewed Slate Digital’s FG‑2A compressor plug‑in, and judged it to be amongst the best software emulations of the Urei/Teletronix LA‑2A tube opto hardware currently available.Īs I explained in that review, there’s an awful lot to love about the LA‑2A, not least the subtle enhancement that it seems to deliver alongside the compression. You can load up to eight modules at once into VMR, but it’s still easy to solo or mute any of the processing modules you have loaded using the Solo and Power buttons. To A/B the signal chains against each other, just press the A or B button in real time to hear that signal chain in action. Once cloned, you can change some parameters on the alternate path, or even swap out entire modules. With VMR it’s easy to clone an entire signal chain for comparison – just press the right arrow and everything currently on path A is copied to path B. You can also drag to reorder the modules as well. You can easily see all of the processing modules installed in the Library Pane, and you just drag and drop to get them into the signal chain. You can change the vibe, color and sound of your mix with a single click and easily undo and redo your changes. VMR 2.0 comes with seven default Dream Strips, although you can remove them and make your own. Now you can instantly start mixing with the modules you use the most. So whenever VMR 2.0 is launched the leftmost Dream Strip always loads first. VMR 2.0 opens with your own custom dream channel strip by default.