UAD and Console
Many software makers now produce plugins to rival the sound and approach of vintage analogue hardware but no company has taken this further than Universal Audio via its UAD powered plugins platform.
Building on the hardware designs of Bill Putnam’s legendary hardware of the ’50s and ’60s, Universal Audio’s digital division initially launched with the attractive feature of hosting the processing of its plugins directly on its hardware, drawing load away from your host computer’s CPU. This remains a key selling point but as computer power has increased, it’s by no means the biggest reason why so many favour Universal Audio hardware. Through its collaborations with companies including SSL, Manley, Lexicon and many others, its plugins are considered class-leading by many, as UAD’s engineers have painstakingly modeled the behaviour of classic hardware.
More importantly, this has stretched to its Unison range, which can be used as preamps or channel strips at tracking stage. A Unison preamp effectively changes the behaviour of the input channel through which you’re recording, emulating the sensitivity, tone and components of vintage circuitry so that, as you play or sing through a microphone, the recording channel behaves as it would with the equivalent hardware connected. Each channel can be set up the same or independently. Want to record each mic channel of a string quartet through SSL E Series channel strips with matched settings? Sure, go ahead.
However, if you’d prefer to set up individual channels to record each bandmember, in real-time, with bespoke preamp, amp and channel strip choices per channel, equally no problem.
The kicker is that once you’ve configured each channel, you can decide whether to monitor through these settings (so the recording captures only the raw audio), or print them, so your settings are captured in the recording process, as they would in a studio crammed with hardware.