I want to talk to you about something I’ve been waiting a long time for now. I’ve had a bunch of buddies who have been beta testers, and they keep throwing it in my face how awesome it is. Slate Digital has announced VMR, the Virtual Mix Rack, and they kind of threw a surprise in there. You can actually download one of the modules with the rack for free.

So you can go to their website, I actually want to show you that first before we look at this free module. You go to slatedigital.com, go to products. They’ll probably have a little banner page there, but go to Virtual Mix Rack. If you want to download the demo, I can’t recommend it enough. Give it a shot. The introductory rate is just $149, you can’t beat that. But Revival is completely free. This module’s got two knobs. Shimmer for a sweet top-end, thickness for a sweet bottom-end, and I’m already using it across my 2buss a little bit. This could be effective in mastering. It’s free.

Don’t let free fool you, it’s extremely powerful, I love what it’s doing. They’ve got some behind-the-scenes stuff going on for sure. Steven Slate mentioned in his intro video that he and Fabrice are taking it to their grave some of the stuff that’s going on, so kind of funny there, but you can download it there, check that out. Slatedigital.com, cool.

Let’s see what it sounds like. I’m going to pull this up. I’ve got a mix here for Samantha Encarnación. One of my friend’s close brothers, Victor Encarnación produced this, and I’m mixing it, so I figured, what the heck, let me pull this in. I’ve got my mix1 that I bounced, and we’ll be hitting that for mix notes, revisions, that whole deal, but I wanted to see what would happen if I threw VMR on my current bounce, so I pulled that back in up here to my reference track at the top. The mix is over here, and I pulled the reference over here to the right, and I’m going to see what VMR can do.

Let’s pull it all the way down. This again is this free module called Revival, and I’m going to hit play where we’ve got some good stuff going on and then we’re going to dial in some tones, and then we’ll bypass it and see what we get.

[mix 1 plays]

Phew! Let’s hear that again. I kind of hit that, and the track dies out there. So this is the power button for this particular module. You could bypass it. Russ over at Pro Tools Expert mentioned that one of the cons that he sees right now, and I agree completely, is the inability to control your makeup or output gain, so you can’t match the level. There’s quite a bit of a drop off, but I’m sure that’ll come in the future. They’ve finally got this thing out, so I’m not going to complain too much. That, and it’s missing a gate in some of these other modules, but we’ll be a little bit more patient as we wait for some of the other things that they’re working on before we cry too much about that.

Let’s go Revival on and off. We’ll have it on, and then I’m going to pull it out.

[mix 1, bypassing and enabling Revival]

And back in. So even in a situation, we’ll call this a mastering situation, I feel like this track, whatever is going on behind-the-scenes, I definitely feel some stereo width happening. I feel like the stereo image is impacted. I feel like aside from it getting brighter and a little more full, I feel like there’s some saturation type stuff going on. I’m definitely getting some kind of a bump that’s pushing things forward in the mix a little bit more. It’s getting bigger. So again, I don’t know how much of that is going to be contributed to gain, but I really dig it, man. I think it’s a great deal. Especially because you can’t beat free.

So check it out. Tell me what you think in the comments. If you haven’t downloaded it yet, go download it, come back, and then tell me, and I look forward to hearing what you guys think.

I’m going to do more videos covering the 1176, the SSL compressor, the Neve, the SSL EQ… I’m loving it, I think it’s great, but we’ll cover that in some other videos. davidglennrecording.com, theproaudiofiles.com, be sure to check out themixacademy.com. Like, subscribe, helps us to bring you more great content, and we will see you guys in the next video.