EACH single frequency is basically an hardware mixed with editing, plugins, other hardware and other editing. I can confirm than 90% of the eq comes from things we NEVER sampled or released. Also original hardware and sometimes software was IMPROVED, for example removing rolloffs, improving the curve or the phase, or adding Dave's trickes. It is a VERY special piece of software.
Noise was removed using a lot of different techniques. We involved Stedal (Stefano Dall'Ora) HEAVILY. Stefano has been tuning ALL samples for MONTHS.
We've sampled a lot of new hardware outboards.
- we have experimented and tested as many software solutions as the hardware ones, trying to understand the strengths and weaknesses.
- each frequency you see in the equalizer (I refer to every possible position of the equalizers) corresponds to a different simulation, to a different sampling. The difficult thing was to make them coexist.
- The final samples were heavily edited. We reduced the roll-off, solved the problem in the infrasonic range. The main problem was to bring all the interventions to a similar range of interventions, also taking into account the intermediate positions.
- In some cases, Dave's tricks have made some frequencies unique (especially when taking into account the initial phase, which comes from sampling).
- in any case, the hardware we have sampled corresponds to new gear that we have never sampled. I personally have gone a long way in this direction, to avoid creating duplication of software of something that we already had in the catalog. This was also Dave's main fear (the fear of repeating something we had already released). We sampled so many new outboards that we could create at least 4 new products
In the face of all this, it is very difficult to talk about "emulations", or specific machines. In some cases we have evaluated many alternatives for the same frequency range, looking for the combination that would make the plugin coherent.
To achieve this
- we have received a very large number of inputs from Dave
- we have often had to work hard to translate some ideas into a product. Luca himself (Pretolesi, Studio DMI) has worked hard because Dave in some cases had in mind a sound or a specific machine, but then in the product did not give the desired result or had characteristics too similar to another frequency. This is a typical case that happened in the high frequencies.
- Stedal (Stefano Dall'Ora) worked incessantly for a few months, trying to arrange the samples at each subsequent review, to take into account new ideas or solve problems. Stefano's work has also been decisive
- in some cases, Stefano had to build specific hardware objects to realize some ideas
- in some cases, we had to heavily edit the samples to make each individual band approaching and unique.
I suggest you read the manual, we have published all the graphs. The manual is particularly nice, it even worked as a cartoonist and we worked together to build what for us could be a small work of art. We put a lot of love into this product, into every step of the process, into every detail. It really behaves like 24 different plugins.
The product is also very light, and fast.