Tim Walther

A vocal tuner fast enough to sing through. In tracking mode it runs at 14.8 ms, so the singer hears their tuned voice in the headphones while they perform — no waiting for the mix to find out how it sits. In mixing mode it switches to TD-PSOLA for the cleanest result. Formants follow the pitch by themselves, so nothing extra has to be set up, and a pitch trace of the last three seconds shows exactly what it did to the take.

An analyser that works out the key of a track and sends it straight to 29TUNE, so the tuning is set right without anyone typing it in. It reads the harmony from spectral peaks, which keeps the drums out of the way. Twelve bars show the notes it is hearing while it decides, and the answer appears once it holds.

Twelve bands, and every single one of them can go dynamic. A dynamic band moves only while that frequency is actually loud — the difference between taming a harsh vocal and dulling it for the whole song. Each band carries filter type, slope, 10 Hz to 30 kHz, ±24 dB and Q from 0.1 to 10, and on the dynamic side a threshold with auto mode, range, attack from 1 to 200 ms and release out to a full second. The spectrum labels its own peaks with their frequency, input and output overlay each other, and freeze, peak hold and solo per band are there for the one resonance you only hear once.

A compressor for vocals, drums and buses, with the transfer curve drawn on top of the live signal so you can see what you are doing while you set it. Ratio to 100:1, soft knee to 72 dB, a range limit that caps how much it can ever take, lookahead to 20 ms, hold, and mix to 200 % for parallel compression. Auto gain, auto release, and a sidechain with its own display.

A reverb that goes from a small room to a twenty-second tail. Bass and treble decay scale independently, so the low end can hold while the top clears. Bloom, shimmer, ducking, reverse and freeze; a tail EQ that shapes the reverb alone; decay and pre-delay lock to host tempo. The decaying field is drawn as a particle sphere.

A sixteen-voice synthesiser with its own effects section built in. Two wavetable oscillators with unison, sub and noise, a filter with envelope and keytracking, two envelopes, two retriggerable LFOs and a modulation matrix. Chorus, delay, EQ, compressor, reverb, distortion, phaser and flanger are on board, along with glide and a pitch envelope for 808s.

A plugin that keeps the vocal at a steady level by itself, the way an engineer rides the fader. Target from -40 to 0 dB, up to 24 dB of range, speed from 20 ms to two seconds, and 40 ms of lookahead so it moves with the syllable. A second input lets it hold its place against the music. Twelve seconds are on screen at once: the vocal, the result, and the range in play.