Tone hunting

As producers and mixing engineers we face daily challenges to make things sound more energetic, more full of life. For every artist, this could mean completely the opposite. Our role is to grasp an artist's vision and make it real through all kinds of sound-shaping methods. We are the Tone Hunters!

Acoustic instruments

Acoustic instruments can take a lot of processing even the natural tone is needed. It’s because of the context. Acoustic instruments can fight against busy arrangements with several layers of instruments clashing into each other. Or the recordings are sounding too sterile, thin or harsh. So you need the tone that can cut through. The tone has to be harmonically rich and fat sounding, but it also needs to have a lot of clarity and tightness at the same time. But it’s not all! Even if the instrument is heavily processed, it also has to be very natural sounding at some point so everyone knows what instrument is played.

And that's why you need ToneSpot.

Let's talk engineering for a while, shall we?

"When a professional audio engineer is building that awesome tone in the studio, he is often running it through some heavy lifting. Blending several re-amping chains with massive filtering, heavy compression, equalization, saturation or even some multiband processing and maybe some other crazy stuff. And it is no secret that the top engineers often run the signal through their chains twice or three times in series until both the engineer and the artist are 100% satisfied with the result. So there is a lot of stuff to do when building a perfect tone.

There are very few products tailored for acoustic instruments post-processing, but most of today’s engineers use very similar workflows."

Meet the ToneSpot Acoustic Pro

ToneSpot Acoustic Pro consists of eight powerful modules plus the input and output sections. They represent the mixing workflow and the signal is fed through them in series from left to right. Each module can be turned ON and OFF separately.

• Character - Determines the basic flavor of the sound.
  
• Saturation - An advanced model of a real valve saturation circuit that has a nice higher harmonics punch.
  
• Shaping - Shape your tone with the 8-band musically labeled EQ.
  
• Punch - Punch is quite a strong compressor with slower attack time and a medium compression ratio.
  
• Surgery - An extreme surgical peak EQ with 2 identical filters and up to -50 db attenuation.
  
• Smash - A peak-eating leveling compressor with faster attack time and a gentle compression ratio.
  
• Effects - Tremolo, Modulation section including Chorus, Flanger and Phaser, and various types of Delay and Reverb.
  
• Finalizer - This is the mastering section of your chain. Sometimes even mixed tracks need a final touch.
• AGC - An automatic gain control included in both input and output sections. It sets the signal level to the plug-in’s 0 dBVU.

   

  Version comparison

  Feature	Pro	Express
  Usage	Maximum flexibility	Quick results, "set & forget"
  Interface Zoom function	Yes	Yes
  Digital input and output meters	Yes	No
  Switchable analog meter	No	Yes
  Price	$99	$49
  iLok required	No	No
  Number of factory presets	214	214
  More factory presets in updates	Yes	Yes
  User presets	Yes	No
  Calibration	Yes	Yes
  AGC control	Yes	Yes
  Fully adjustable modules:	Yes	No

  Gallery

Videos

Discover the product features in Audified and 3rd party video tutorials and reviews.