Acustica Green 5 Ultra EQ First Impressions GML 8200 Plugin Green5 Audio George Massenburg Labs
Adam checks out Acustica Audio's Green5 Ultra plugin for the first time. It's (unofficially) an emulation of the GML 8200 equalizer and 2030 mastering compressor.
Transcript
00:00Bypassed.
00:14That is something right there.
00:17That is clean but smooth.
00:23Okay, so I matched sand 3 to green 5 ultra.
00:33Or actually I matched green 5 ultra to sand.
00:37The reason I did that is because I'm very impressed by the way this sounds already and
00:42I wanted to see how the curves could be equal or not.
00:45It looks like it's a possibility that, you know, it's close enough.
00:52Anyway, let's get into the controls here, the more difficult to understand controls.
00:59First of all, up here, we have a mid side button in the center here.
01:04And what that does is it turns the left side into the mid.
01:09And if you don't know what the mid is, it is just the mono material, the stuff that
01:14is straight up the pan, snares, lead vocals, kick drum, things like that.
01:21So if you're using this on a master where you only have a stereo track, it comes in
01:27handy to have the mid side be separated.
01:32Now the side is anything that's not mono.
01:36And the controls for that then go on the right side.
01:39And you want to make sure that the control link, which is down here, is depressed because
01:44otherwise, check this out.
01:48Your controls are linked.
01:53If control link is on and control link is off, so the controls are not linked anymore.
01:59Makes sense, right?
02:00The left and right controls.
02:01Now, that's not true for the pan knob, the spread.
02:06And there's one more that that does not equate to.
02:11But next up, we have this control.
02:15It says MET off.
02:17I'm skipping the ones that are pretty easy to understand.
02:20Pre means preamp.
02:22Preamp on, it's closer to the hardware.
02:25Anyway, MET off is the meters.
02:29See how they're disabled now?
02:31And then over here, we have INT, which stands for integrated loudness.
02:39That's what the meter will now be.
02:41MMT, this button, stands for momentary loudness.
02:50Integrated loudness.
02:56And that affects the meter down here, the LU meter, the loudness units meter.
03:01And then finally, SRT stands for short term loudness.
03:10And these are all based off of EBU-128 standards, R-128 standards.
03:18RES down here, I thought it stood for resolution.
03:21No, it's reset.
03:23Reset these meters, especially this one over here.
03:26And then we also have phase reverse buttons.
03:30And these are sometimes hard to miss or hard to see because it's such a tiny little control.
03:38This is the low shelf button.
03:41And up here is the high shelf button.
03:44And it changes your high and your low to be shelving filters instead of peak filters.
03:51In the bottom right corner, we have our different listening modes.
03:54LR is a standard left, right, just normal processing.
04:00M, we're only hearing the mid processing.
04:04So that's handy when we have the MS enabled.
04:07I just disabled it, by the way.
04:09And then S stands for sides.
04:12So again, we're only listening to the side information.
04:16The mono information is not in the signal.
04:20And then finally, the delta control, it shows us the difference between the processed signal
04:26and the unprocessed signal.
04:29Under the different modes here, we have hyper equalizer, which is like the standard acoustical
04:35audio hardware sampling underneath that is a lower CPU consumption mode.
04:42And the main difference is there can be possible phasing artifacts.
04:48And just the same with the hyper EQ mode, when they sample hardware and they only sample
04:54the different frequencies, for example, anything in between that isn't 100% accurate.
05:01That's what these other modes are for, hyper EQ digital and digital 2X.
05:05When you're in those modes, the interpolated frequencies are more accurate.
05:10Also, the gain range is more accurate.
05:13Now let's go on to the mono EQ mode.
05:18And that is where we have the brand new frequency graph that you can actually drag the nodes
05:25of.
05:26Oh yeah, look at that.
05:29Look at that.
05:30I like how the knobs move at the same time as this.
05:33So as we go, and I'll even do a little mouse wheel scroll as I'm moving it, actually that's
05:40too much for it.
05:41So I'll do it right here, making the width, making the Q wider or narrower.
05:48By the way, if you ever forget which number is wider, now obviously down here we have
05:54a setting that we can see when it gets narrower.
05:59Wait, why is it not doing anything?
06:01Is it messing up already?
06:04This is like version one.
06:06So let me see something here, guys.
06:09All right, I'm going to have to restart this then.
06:14Okay, let's see if it works this time.
06:24There we go.
06:25That's what I wanted it to do.
06:26What happened was, I think when I was moving this around and I also moved the scroll wheel,
06:33you see how it messed it up?
06:34Wait, it's still working.
06:37I don't know why I messed up earlier.
06:41The way you remember the Q setting is that the higher the quality of an EQ filter, the
06:49larger the number.
06:53So if you look carefully, it says 0.4, and then 1, then 2, 3, and 4.
06:58So obviously the lower number is going to be the width, okay?
07:04That's only on hardware.
07:06Software might be different, but like I said, the beautiful thing is we don't have to rely
07:10on our memory now.
07:11We can just see it down here in the graph, and that is an awesome thing.
07:16The cool thing about the Green 5 EQ is that it actually works in parallel.
07:24It is a parallel topology, meaning that as you move your different frequency bands, they
07:32all...
07:33Best way to put it is, it's similar to the way a Manley Massive Passive Equalizer works,
07:42or how a Pultec Equalizer works.
07:45Everything is combined instead of being in series, and so it's a more natural sound.
07:52If you already have enough equalizers in your toolkit, you may not need this one.
07:56But man, I am so jealous of you guys who are just getting started, or maybe you're not
08:02happy with the plugins you already have.
08:04You guys have some awesome tools to check out.
08:07This one, if you're trying to do some kind of mastering, it's really perfect.
08:11This is like one of the big guns in the mastering engineer's toolkit.
08:22And this is just one part of the plugin.
08:25Green also comes with a compressor, which I'll be messing with.
08:29I really don't like to...
08:30It's not that I don't like to, I just don't usually use the acoustic compressors, because
08:35I didn't used to use them for the longest time.
08:39I just wasn't really happy with them, but ever since, I would say around the time Tiger
08:44came out, I've been really happy with the way they've sounded, plus the CPU is a lot
08:52less than their compressors used to be.
08:56So I'll probably dig into this one.
08:59It's a little on the complicated side, but I'll probably get used to it.
09:05You don't have to touch every single control.
09:08And the cool thing is they do have a little visualizer there, which is kind of neat, but
09:13I don't know why that says fast right there.
09:16Oh, you know what?
09:17This might be a two-part compressor or something.
09:21Huh.
09:23That's interesting.
09:24A two-stage compressor.
09:25I'll have to look into what this hardware is that this is sampled from, but anyway, thank
09:32you all for watching.
09:33This has been Adam for realhomerecording.com.
09:35If the video was helpful in some way, hit the like button.
09:39Hit the thumbs up button.
09:40And if you tried Green 5 out for yourself, I want to know what you think about it in
09:44the comments below.
09:45See ya.