Hey folks.
I’ve been considering upgrading to the UA neve unison preamp. I record a lot of vocals and acoustic instruments and have been using the 610 preamp that comes with the Apollo. I’m also open to other unison suggestions. Curious what y’all have to say about it.
Thanks,
Jack
Hello Jack,
I have the Neve 1073 hardware and various UA unison plugins which are fantastic. The difference to the hardware is not that big, especially when you consider the price. I mostly use the plugins for recording.
Regards Ivan
Been loving my Apollo! First as a buddy reminded me, take advantage of their demos. This is assuming you have not used them. Great way to actually test something before committing to it. I hear your UAD demos also reset after a purchase. Second, I would suggest taking advantage of the sale currently going on + looking at premade or custom “you pick” bundles. The higher you go, the more you are saving. When I first got my Apollo a month or two back I bought a premade bundle with 20-30 of the main plugins for a good deal ($150-300 can’t remember off top). It didn’t include the Neve 1073, but after demoing I realized it was a bit aggressive for me (a video I watched showed the 1084 had more flexibility by way of EQ and signal but a different tone). When using the Unison preamp you are committing forever, so I ended up landing on a softer Avalon 737 (just the pre amp) into a light CL-1B. The CL-1B was $299 last month while everything else was on sale. Now it’s $149. Steal right? Not when I can go for the custom “you pick” 10 bundle for $350 & grab the CL-1B, the Neve 1073, C-Suite Vox clean up & 7 others. While I’ve been deciding I’ve used the original CL-1B demo and the Mach II demo, giving me a month of use before committing with the bundle. Third, they also have their monthly subscription plan with a certain amount of plugins included. You could check that out as a way to demo/use their plugins as well. Hope this helps!
Advice here would be to monitor with the plugin, but not print pre or EQ colour that onto your captured wav… when you mix, you might want to change things. So, in UAD console, the blue monitoring option, not the red.
If you print it, you will come back to it later and have to re-record it, if you’ve been a bit over-zealous with the “colour”… you can always re-apply it, freeze or print to a track to save DSP at mix time (I first made this mistake 25 years ago, thinking “I know what I’m doing”… no, I didn’t lol I had been a pro engineer for a decade by then - don’t be over-confident when it comes to printing, err on the side of caution :))
The other FYI is that Neve stuff is about audio clarity - gentle harmonic transformer saturation, subtle enhancement, not OTT distortion. You can throw any pre stage into that zone, but tbh that’s not how Neve pre modules are usually used in studios. Having said that, if you need a distorted vocal, go for it, but if you asked a studio engineer to run their gain structure like that, they’d say “this isn’t what Neve desks are about”.
Capture your source without artefacts or compression and then mess it up later on. A gentle limit (a few db of comp) on the way in may be the way to go if you’re hitting tape - but imho don’t print colour, because once you’ve lost the signal, you can never recreate the original source.
Hope that helps!
The API and UA pre’s are also v good.
One thing you might want to avoid is imprinting the same tonal colour on lots of channels across your mix. DSP sounds quite like the real thing - but analogue channels all vary subtly, so you avoid having the same (e.g.) 1.5k “colour spike” across vocal, guitar, bass, keys, drums…
This is a major downside of digital hardware emulation, esp when pushed more into colour territory - e.g. the Kemper Stage I have can be used for a couple of parts - but that’s it… just the same way that you wouldn’t use the same amplifier for all the guitars, because you get the same kind of “fizz” on everything.
So, don’t use the same 1176 across every channel in a mix. In isolation, each one sounds “just like the real thing”, when summed - not enough variance drops clarity. Depends what you’re mixing too.