Stereo Tool

This little humble preset I believe would take anything you throw at it and make it come out kinda nice at the other end. Inspired by the analog age and homemade multipath system setups…

The basic is simple, NoiseGate, Simple AGC, Multiband, then a few db limit on top at the end.

Set input to be -6 db max giving lot of headroom on top for "those times things dont work right" like extreme overshots and so on.
Normaly I would never feed AGC with more than 6db gain reduction. Over that the AGC will color the sound to much in my ears. If you choose to use more than one band the effect on AGC coloring with be much higher. If you need to use AGC for gainriding then give it more to work with.
The multiband settings is inspired from the days we used vinyl where the headroom on a record would be from needle noice to 0db, probably less than 20 db. Now with the digital stuff the headroom is much higher giving you room to play more with multiband coloring. I dislike when a high vocal suddenly lowers a gitar and/or a hihat. Thats why the crossover between the bands is pretty none existing. Then at the end I use the Advanced limiter just a bit so that it just blinks rather than killing the rest of the dynamics.
This preset used to have a 4 band multiband compressor, and I've uped that to full 9 bands more for the fun of it. I feel that it kinda works in a weird way.

In my ears this has a crispy high and some kicks bellow without me hearing the prosessors to much. It is verry prosessed but gives some room for air in between.

The settings for Declipper and NaturalDynamics that are in there comes from Bojchas J preset i think. I dont use the Declipper or the Natural Dynamics, but I left the settings there after testing it out.

Back in the old world the big thingi with nice, clean and loud radiosound was to never make the different boxes kill each other. Let each box do what they do best and then tune them to fit. In this preset the attacs and releasetimes for AGC, Multiband and the advaced clipper never collide. Where one misses a beat the next smoothes it out.

Have fun.

MrDonT