Waves Audio has announced the expansion of its custom-shop Magma series with the release of the BB Tubes plugin, the second plugin in the series providing tube saturation for vocals and instruments. It provides two main controls:
— Beauty, designed to foster more delicate harmonic saturation where users want to make a sound “blossom” before it breaks up, achieving an instant roundness and a larger low-mid.
— Beast, designed to deliver immediate “in-your-face” energy, attitude and aggression, all the way to crunch distortion. It also includes an A/B switch to select between two different tube types.
The Beauty control cascades into Beast, so users are encouraged to blend the two knobs – tuning and tweaking them for a range of saturation sounds for any part, style or genre.
“When I first tried BB Tubes I was shocked. I’ve been putting it first in my vocal chain – it just gives me this larger vocal that’s also more intimate,” says Rob Kinelski (Billie Eilish). “Honestly, I’ve never heard anything like this. It brings something different to the table which I can’t even explain. It sounds amazing,” adds Neal H Pogue (Steve Lacy, Tyler, the Creator).
“It’s rare that a new plugin comes along and is an instant game-changer. Without much effort I had a vocal sounding incredible. Then drums, then synths, then guitars, then bass. I truly feel like this plugin will become a classic,” states Dave Pensado (Justin Bieber).
BB Tubes is also designed to hep dial up the loudness of a mix in an appealing way — the soft clipping of the tubes brings down transient peak levels while increasing perceived loudness, resulting in a much louder mix before digital clipping. The plugin also offers options for a pre- and post-hi-shelf EQ, transformer in/out, bass relief (which removes the low frequencies from the side-chain input), a sensitivity control (which lets the user choose the point at which the tubes are hit), a dry/wet knob and output gain.
BB Tubes is included in these Waves bundles: Mercury, Pro Show, SD7 Pro Show. Go here for more specifics.
