The Jan Diaries — Five Essential Plugins (Part One)

Red Bull Hrvatska · The Jan Diaries · 20 January 2021

The first of two instalments on the software Jan Kinčl actually reaches for, this column starts from a position rather than a shopping list: analogue gear supplies character and colour, plugins supply flexibility, and the useful studio is the one that runs both at once. His own range, as he puts it, stretches from a 1975 analogue string keyboard to a plugin whose functions the analogue domain could never manage. Part two, published a few weeks later, adds the other five.

The first five

DMGAudio EQuilibrium leads, on the grounds that EQ is the alpha and omega of shaping sound. The pitch is partly about pedigree — the DMGAudio team came out of Focusrite, Novation, Sonalksis and Brainworx, and their tools read as solutions from the field rather than from a boardroom — and partly about range: Kinčl calls it one of the most flexible EQs he has met, equally at home cleaning low end off a single channel and doing complex mid-side work at the mastering stage. Next comes the RX950 Classic AD/DA Converter, which chases the crunchy twelve-bit character of Akai’s S950 and MPC60. He is honest about its limits: the original sound came from a whole chain of technical circumstances, not the converter alone, so the emulation cannot be exact. He uses it constantly anyway. Third is Waves NLS Non-Linear Summer, deliberately misused — it is a summing plugin, but the drive in its Mike setting makes such a good saturator that it ended up all over an album, and it is now his default test for any instrument that needs waking up.

TAL-U-NO-LX models the Roland Juno-106 from 1984, the proven workhorse that turns up in every professional studio because it handles bass lines, leads, strings and pads equally well — and which, in hardware form, needs constant servicing. The emulation, chorus included, is close enough that Kinčl recommends it without reservation. Waves J37 Tape closes the round; he keeps around fifteen Waves plugins in rotation, mostly from the Abbey Road series, modelled on the gear in the London studio.

The part that stayed

The J37 entry carries the sharpest thought in the piece. Kinčl would rather run material through his actual Revox A77 and a Fabris B77, the machine most of his finished music passed through across 2019 and 2020. Where the plugin earns its place is wow and flutter — the small internal instabilities that make old machines charming, borrowed to loosen up digital sound that is too clean and too precise. His example is exact: one string note on the old Roland RS-101 holds so much life that his only remaining job is to play something interesting, whereas the same chord from a plugin usually has to be animated afterwards, by J37 or by Abbey Road Vinyl.