If you are a guitar player who records his own tracks or a mix engineer or hobbyist trying to preserve the essence of the original guitar tone you are fully aware of the challenges of translating that tone to a mix. Let’s face it, what we hear standing in front of the amps is not what we get in the recording. It takes a lot of crafting and shaping to get guitars to sound right in a mix. But many guitar players are tone chasers and they want to translate a sound they have crafted in the room into something that sounds great in the mix. Audified has dropped a new plugin to address that specific function. ToneSpot Electric Pro is a plugin, supported by most DAWS, designed to work with your existing tone and make it better. So whether you are recording real amps or crafting your tone with amp sims, ToneSpot Electric Pro will take the tone you’ve got and help you push it to the next level and beyond.
What’s really cool about ToneSpot Electric Pro is that it is designed specifically for guitars. So the options presented to you are designed for a guitar workflow. The interface is super clean and is divided into 9 logical modules. The top of the plugin delivers standard input/output, preset and blend functions. Following that you have:
Voicing: Well-known and often used EQ shapes
Saturation: Valve saturation
Shaping: 8 band EQ with hi-pass and low pass filters
Smash: Compressor
Surgery: Peak EQ filters.
Effects: Tremolo, modulation, delay and reverb effects
Finalizer: Mastering module
So my first impression of Tone Spot Electric Pro is really positive. I’ve acquired a bunch of different plugins to help me shape my guitar sound but what I love about this is it is all here. I can build the foundation of my tone the way I want to and then I can throw Tone Spot on to do the final shaping and coloring. And with a plugin that integrates everything I need, it gets my tones to where they need to be much faster. Plus, doing it this way limits the number of plugins I end up using in my sessions giving me a ton of CPU savings. The modules are all built with the guitar in mind. The EQ module is a great example. The frequency bands you have to work with focus on the areas where a guitar typically sits removing a lot of the guesswork. And having a palette of digital effects built-in within the whole workflow gives you a much better way to introduce these effects into your tone as opposed to throwing them on later.
I think this is a great tool to have in your inventory. I’m at a point where I’m looking for ways to shorten the time it takes me to finish a mix. I generally spend a ton of time on guitars and ToneSpot Electric Pro has already started to create some efficiencies in that process and I’m really liking the results. If you’ve got a great tone and you are just trying to find a way to make it sit better in the mix or if you are looking for a comprehensive system for your recorded guitar, then ToneSpot Electric Pro is definitely worth a look.
For more information about ToneSpot Electric Pro please visit audified.com