Introducing Sonible's New Mini Plugins: Pure Verb, Pure Comp, and Pure Limit

Tutorial | Mar 22, 2023

In this video, I talk about three new plugins by Sonoble that just came out today: Pure Verb, Pure Comp, and Pure Limit. These are smaller versions of their bigger plugins, which have fewer controls. These plugins are perfect for creative people who want to dial in a few parameters and move on. I demonstrate how to use each plugin and offer some tips along the way. These plugins are a great addition to any mixing or mastering workflow, especially for those who want to simplify the process. If you're interested, check out the links in the description to try them out for yourself.

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Questions & Answers #

Maybe you dont watch the video, here are some important takeaways:

What are the new plugins by Sonoble and how do they differ from their bigger counterparts? #

The new plugins by Sonoble are Pure Verb, Pure Comp, and Pure Limit, which are smaller versions of their bigger plugins called Smart Reverb, Smart Compressor, and Smart Limiter. The smaller plugins have fewer controls, making them more suitable for creative people who want to quickly dial in a few parameters and move on with their work. In contrast, the bigger plugins are more geared towards mastering engineers who need more control over the audio processing.

How do the Pure Verb plugins work and what is their purpose? #

In a mixing workflow, the Pure Verb plugin is used to position sounds in a spatial environment. The plugin adds reverb to tracks to make them sound like they are positioned in the background or foreground. The plugin offers controls for mix, size, and pitch WIF, which regulates the pitch modulation of the reverb. The plugin doesn't aim to add lush reverb but to serve as a mixing tool to position sounds in the mix.

How do the controls on Pure Comp affect the audio processing, and what are the drawbacks of the plugin? #

The Pure Comp plugin is a compressor that has controls for gain reduction, mix, and clarity. Gain reduction controls how much the compressor reduces the gain of the input signal, mix regulates the mix between dirty and clean, and clarity is a tonal balance or spectral EQ. The plugin also offers different profiles to choose from, although the user cannot change the attack and release times manually. The drawback of the plugin is that it lacks manual control over attack and release times.

What are the unique features of Pure Limit and how should it be used? #

Pure Limit is a limiter Plugin that offers profiles for different styles such as classic, acoustic, funk, and electronic. The plugin also features an inflate button, which increases the apparent loudness and bass level of a track without increasing the peak levels. Pure Limit is best used on the master bus, and the recommended threshold is -1dB to avoid peaking. The user can also analyze the material to see what triggers the limiter and manually adjust the levels to prevent excessive triggering.

Transcription #

This is what im talking about in this video. The text is transcribed by AI, so it might not be perfect. If you find any mistakes, please let me know.
You can also click on the timestamps to jump to the right part of the video, which should be helpful.

[00:00.000] So, in today's video, it's about these three new plugins by Sonobl, they just came out
[00:05.740] today.
[00:06.740] Pure Verb, Pure Comp, Pure Limit, and they are kind of small little sisters of the
[00:13.700] bigger plugins called Smart Reverb, Smart Compressor and Smart Limiter, and they have less
[00:21.220] controls.
[00:22.220] So, when you look here, maybe at Smart Compressor, right, this is the mini version,
[00:29.940] and that's the bigger version.
[00:32.780] There are a lot of controls missing on the smart one, which in my opinion is actually not
[00:38.060] a bad thing, because most of the times, if you're a creative person, you want to just
[00:44.060] dial in roughly a few parameters and call it a day.
[00:49.100] And here you, yeah, you feel basically that you're going in too deep, that you tweak too
[00:56.860] much, and then at the end, you are unhappy with your decisions, and then you go back and
[01:02.740] tweak again, and then you're thinking about all the possibilities you're missing out,
[01:08.540] and you start to tweak another time, right?
[01:11.340] So, this is more for like mastering engineers, and this is more like aimed at creative people
[01:18.020] that just want to dial in if you parameters and want to move on.
[01:23.340] So, there are links in the description to these trial versions here.
[01:29.660] You can try it out for yourself or you buy it.
[01:32.340] I think you get all three for 49 bucks at the moment, into a sale, and yeah, maybe it's
[01:41.180] for you.
[01:42.180] So, I want to give you a rough idea how they work.
[01:45.220] Maybe let's remove here the Smart Comp, in the background I have a track, and I removed
[01:49.740] all my usual mastering tools here, cross-over DB-meter, DSEQ-3, and then the Elevator by
[01:59.140] Newfangled Audio, and replaced it with the Pure Comp and Pure Reverb and Pure Limit
[02:05.340] here.
[02:06.340] You can see they all need playback before they can act, or before they reveal all their
[02:11.660] parameters.
[02:12.660] You can change.
[02:13.660] So, we start you with the verb, because the verb is in a mixing, in a mixing, in a mixing
[02:23.660] workflow, it's more like aiming at positioning your sounds in a spatial environment.
[02:30.740] So, you can put tracks in the foreground or in the background by choosing how much
[02:36.220] you re-wrap you are adding to that track.
[02:40.100] So, here we analyze the input signal, so just let the run in the background, and I hit
[02:46.900] 3x here, then you can change here the mix, the size.
[03:11.060] I think your synthetic is changing how much pitch WIF, at least that's how it looks
[03:21.940] and how it sounds.
[03:23.780] So if you put this down here, it sounds more chaotic and random.
[03:37.220] And at 100 here, it sounds more ordered in my ears, it's not so random, so I think it's
[03:42.780] about the delay time modulation, something about that.
[03:48.460] And this reverb, in my opinion, doesn't sound, yeah, let's say it sounds good, but it's
[03:57.060] not aiming at adding something special to your lead sounds or add sounds where you want
[04:04.660] to put on a lush reverb and then it sounds beautiful and wide and spacey.
[04:11.580] This is more aiming at a tool, or it's more like a tool that you can use to put sound
[04:18.660] in the background or more like a foreground.
[04:21.020] It has more like a utility character, if you know what I mean.
[04:25.180] So if you're searching for a nice lush reverb, you can use for MV and then that's probably
[04:32.020] not what you're gonna search for, it's more like, it's like a mixing tool.
[04:36.580] So yeah, I pull this here a bit down to maybe 50.
[04:41.980] And there are also different modes here, normal mode, infinite mode, you have an infinite
[04:45.620] reverb there.
[04:49.620] Reverse.
[04:52.620] Bounce, which is back and forth, so it plays the only material back and forth, at least
[04:59.900] here, the feedback buffer, yeah, normal is best.
[05:16.540] Also mix here of maybe 10, 20, I just want to put a small reverb on there to get the
[05:23.060] sense of spacey environment.
[05:26.500] Okay, so next up here is the compressor, so we can also analyze this here.
[05:32.660] I'm also using here universal profile, you can change different profiles.
[05:39.020] I don't know exactly what they change.
[05:42.380] I guess it's more about you skipping through the profiles here and using something that
[05:49.940] you like.
[05:51.740] I would advise maybe on the master bus to go for a universal because it's not vocals,
[05:57.180] not drums, not snare, not guitar, and it's keys and not speech, so universal, right?
[06:03.460] Same here on the pure comp, you have different profiles here, it's drum space, keys, mix,
[06:12.100] soft, moderate, hard.
[06:13.500] I think that's probably something for the mastering bus, also universal.
[06:18.540] So let's stick with universal first and analyze the material.
[06:31.580] So here you can see the gain reduction here on the right, the small red indicator, those
[06:37.460] you how much gain reduction there is, can increase that, it also compensates for the output
[06:46.180] loudness here with the auto gain, you can disable this and can choose manually output gain
[06:54.740] here, but auto gain is fine, but this is too much gain reduction, but just for the sake
[07:05.020] of this video.
[07:19.380] So basically dirty adds a lot of overtones, it sounds more like there is a saturation
[07:24.420] at the end, at least it introduces a lot of overtones and I'm going here for a mix, so
[07:32.500] which is between dirty and clean, and maybe compression, not that much.
[07:46.620] And then we have clarity here, which is more like a tonal balancer or spectral balancing
[07:51.300] tool, so if you have to set 100, it's, I think the, maybe the curve, the base curve
[08:02.140] of this is probably equally loudness or maybe pink noise.
[08:06.380] So it tries to EQ your material, remove some resonances, maybe some in-balances there,
[08:11.860] not much even if you have to set 100, it doesn't do that much in my opinion.
[08:17.780] So you can happily tweak this around here.
[08:22.220] So just so that you know that's also an EQ in here, a spectral EQ or spectral balancer,
[08:28.300] however you want to call it.
[08:31.140] Then we can also try out your different profiles, let's do that.
[08:50.420] So it changes different settings, I also think it changes the attack and release times
[08:55.740] of the compressor, because you can't change this manually here in the purecom, in the
[09:01.540] smart compressor, you can change it here, you can't, but the compressor without changing
[09:08.540] attack and release times doesn't make any sense in my opinion, so it needs to do that
[09:14.380] in the background somehow.
[09:18.980] The biggest drawback is that you can't change it manually, so you can change it or tweak
[09:23.100] it anywhere you like it.
[09:26.900] It's more like an automatic process, so you have to trust the analyzer and the profiles
[09:31.660] here for that.
[09:32.660] Or we go for you, nervously here.
[09:42.140] That's fine.
[09:50.180] And then we have pure limits, so we have to analyze it again here, what comes out of the
[09:54.140] compressor.
[10:01.140] I have also different styles, but that's what I like.
[10:14.580] It's classic, acoustic, funk, electronic, there's also no threshold here, you can't
[10:26.580] change this here on the settings page, limit the threshold, minus 1 dB, that's advised
[10:32.540] to have this on the master, just because of two peaks and so on, so minus 1 dB here, it's
[10:39.220] just okay.
[10:40.220] You have a lot of things here you can change also here on the compressor, or instance,
[10:45.180] I have enabled all to gain after learning, I have this enabled here, pure burp is also,
[10:52.580] well that's nothing here, use OpenGL, yeah that's it.
[11:13.380] I have no idea really what inflate does here, but I think the tooltip says yeah, inflate
[11:20.020] your signal to increase the apparent loudness and bass level of your track without increasing
[11:26.540] peak levels.
[11:28.300] So I think it messes around with the tonal balance a bit, pushes up the bass and so on,
[11:34.140] at least it sounds this way.
[11:42.780] The bass comes out a bit more.
[11:46.580] You can see we don't have here that much peak reduction, we also don't need to.
[12:01.780] And it looks like it's only the snare triggering here at the limit of that hard, so we can't
[12:09.340] probably also go here to the drums and tone down the, yeah let's do this, but this one
[12:24.420] here, see, so now the snare is not triggering the limiter in the end that much anymore, but
[12:36.740] that's something I do sometimes, look at the master and see what's triggering the
[12:44.220] limiter that hard, maybe it's just one sound, one special sound here, it's the snare,
[12:50.300] so I pull this down by 1 dB and then the limiter doesn't rock that hard anymore, yeah.
[12:59.180] This maybe, it's maybe not the best rock flow, but sometimes that's what I do, let's
[13:15.700] just dB me down here, so we have your short term loudness max minus 7.5, which is pretty
[13:40.460] loud, let's go that's you, one deep, yeah,
[14:11.300] go for Universal, yeah I really don't know what exactly the profiles are changing if
[14:22.300] they just change, if this is just a preset, so it's a bit mysterious or kind of a black
[14:28.420] box thing, what they change in the background, maybe they also change attack and release times,
[14:34.740] I have no idea, I can only judge it by what I'm hearing, so yeah, these are basically
[14:43.020] new on the market, as of today I want to make a video about this because I know Sonible
[14:48.740] for years now, I use some of their bigger plug-ins and I think it's actually nice to have
[14:53.780] some smaller plug-ins of these bigger things here on the market, like I said for a creative
[15:02.860] person, it's sometimes easier to just tweak some of these few parameters here and call
[15:09.220] it day and move on with your track, I probably use these here even more than the bigger ones
[15:16.980] because compressor is sometimes something I don't like to tweak and sometimes I just need
[15:25.540] something to glue something together on a bus, so I would probably use to compute or
[15:31.300] compare and put it on a drum bus and tweak these settings and call it day, so yeah, that's
[15:39.540] it basically for this video, I want to show you these, as I said, link is in the description,
[15:44.620] maybe give it a try with the trial versions and let me know what you think in the comments
[15:49.140] below, thanks for watching, see you, bye!