Softube / Layers

[Piet De Ridder]

Softube have released an “all-encompassing doubling and widening tool” Layers. Next to doubling and widening, it sounds like it’s also a great tool for putting things in a space in ways that reverb, on its own, can’t quite accomplish. Quickest way to get an idea of the possibilities, is to watch the walkthrough.

- Instinctive control over doubles
- Six different widening algorithms
- Quick command of organic modulation
- Visualizations to avoid unwanted artifacts and see the doubling
- Full- & multiband compression
- De-essing
- Octave effects

Introduction price is €82, full price €123. My mouse pointer is hovering over the ‘Add to cart’-button, but I’m going to think about for a few more moments first.





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[Guy Rowland]

The demos aren't at all what I was expecting. Most of the examples are chorusy/flangey - modulated doubling. Then there's a fair bit of pitch shifting too. It feels like a combination of iZotope Nectar and an H3000, with a spatialiser thown in.

What I didn't hear in the walkthrough is a demonstration of pure depth - he mentions room sound. What room(s) I wonder?

I'm not sure it's doing anything fundamentally new, but the interface and functionality look and sound appealing.

[Piet De Ridder]

Yeah, I don't understand the choice of demos either.

But about that 'room': there is no room. There is the suggestion of a 'room' through the use of multiple short delays. Short delays acting as a sort of ... early reflections. It's a really great technique. I use short delays — anywhere between 40 and 90 seconds, depending on what you want to suggest, darkened a little and with not too much feedback — in everything I do. Often no more than a near subliminal pinch of them, but it's very, very effective I find. Not only do you get a really nice sense of space around your sounds, but it also becomes much easier (I think so anyway) to add reverb to your tracks (and you don't need as much reverb as you would normally use). Works best in smaller spatial settings of course. I sometimes use (longer) delays in larger settings too (especially on brass), equally subtly, but those are a different sort of delays — more your typical echo type of thing — and they function differently too.

What I like about Layer's delays is that it seems so easy to place them in the stereo-field at various widths and depths (all within one plugin) and that you have so much tonal control over them. Haven't made my purchase yet, but I'm definitely going to demo Layers soon.

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[playz123]

Piet wrote: "short delays — anywhere between 40 and 90 seconds". LOL, I'm guessing that is not what you really meant to say??

[Luciano Storti]

I use short delays — anywhere between 40 and 90 seconds, depending on what you want to suggest, darkened a little and with not too much feedback — in everything I do. Often no more than a near subliminal pinch of them, but it's very, very effective I find. Not only do you get a really nice sense of space around your sounds, but it also becomes much easier (I think so anyway) to add reverb to your tracks (and you don't need as much reverb as you would normally use). Works best in smaller spatial settings of course. I sometimes use (longer) delays in larger settings too (especially on brass), equally subtly, but those are a different sort of delays — more your typical echo type of thing — and they function differently too.

Just tried this out with a couple of different Delay plugins on a percussive Piano track and a Drum beat. Fascinating "effect." Definitely and enveloping sort of thing. Gets to be too much quite quickly but if you dial it in just right, I think I can see what you're talking about, Piet. Do you ever add any modulation to the Delay itself? I was using Logic's Tape Delay and liked it for this, including the HiFreq roll-off. What do you use? And would you care to elaborate on your approach for Brass?

Thank you, seems like a useful technique!

[Piet De Ridder]

Piet wrote: "short delays — anywhere between 40 and 90 seconds". LOL, I'm guessing that is not what you really meant to say??

Milli- of course. Milliseconds. Dear me.

(...) Do you ever add any modulation to the Delay itself? I was using Logic's Tape Delay and liked it for this, including the HiFreq roll-off. What do you use? And would you care to elaborate on your approach for Brass?

I’ve got a few delays to choose from and there’s not much between them for this particular purpose. I don’t really have a preference. Well, maybe EchoBoy (because I’m so comfortable with it). But there’s others that work equally well. For that spatial feel though, I prefer a plugin that’s capable of generating stereo delays, so mono mock-vintage delays (like UA’s wonderful EP-34 or Pulsar Audio’s Echorec and such), which get used very often for other things, aren’t chosen for this task.

No, I don’t use any modulation. I don’t like that whirly, slightly nauseous sound. Not in this context anyway. It’s very important, I find, to aim for a barely noticeable and above all natural-sounding presence of space. A listener should never say: “Hey, there’s a short delay on that, isn’t there?” Not good. You don’t want people to hear it, but you’d hear it when you take it out.

There’s two different ways I use delay on brass. The first one is to emulate something I occasionally hear on records too: brass instruments being so brassy, they sometimes trigger much more pronounced early reflections than the other sections of the orchestra do. Well, it’s more than just early reflections, it’s a sort of additional concentration of delays, clearly separated from the source and not yet dissolved in the tail. Percussion triggers these things as well, but adding delay(s) to percussion in a mock-up, even when hardly audible, is always a bit risky, as in: potentially messy, I find. With brass however it often works, to my ears. The idea here is to generate a single, fairly short, blurry cluster of delays and preceding that with whatever amount of predelay fits you spatial illusion.

A great (quite possibly: the best) tool for this is Flux’s IrcamVerb. In fact, that’s where I got the term ‘cluster’ from for this phenomenon. IrcamVerb splits its reverb in three stages: (1) the Early Reflections, (2) the Cluster and (3) the Tail. And the great thing is: you can mute any of these stages and simply work with the one that you need, in our case; the Cluster.

The second way is adding a delay — this time more of a classic ‘echo’ — to brass solos, especially slower ones. It’s not a realistic effect or anything we’re going for here, but it just adds someting which, to my ears, has musical and esthetic value. It is what I always call my “The Hills Are Alive”-trick. As with the other techniques, this one needs to be added extremely subtly too. One of those “the moment you hear it, dial it back a few notches”-things, you know. And when mixed in just right, it somehow increases the soaring or majestic or noble qualities in brass phrases. Not essential, just nice.

I’d love to make some audio examples of all of this, but I’m working on this rather heavy and complex thing in Logic at the moment (with various channels routed to Vienna Ensemble and SPAT Revolution), and I hate to close it before I’m done with it.

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[Guy Rowland]

Thanks Piet, looking forward to this when time allows.

Early request that this thread ultimately gets a summary and put into The Workshop.

[Luciano Storti]

Piet wrote: "short delays — anywhere between 40 and 90 seconds". LOL, I'm guessing that is not what you really meant to say??

Milli- of course. Milliseconds. Dear me.

(...) Do you ever add any modulation to the Delay itself? I was using Logic's Tape Delay and liked it for this, including the HiFreq roll-off. What do you use? And would you care to elaborate on your approach for Brass?

I’ve got a few delays to choose from and there’s not much between them for this particular purpose. I don’t really have a preference. Well, maybe EchoBoy (because I’m so comfortable with it). But there’s others that work equally well. For that spatial feel though, I prefer a plugin that’s capable of generating stereo delays, so mono mock-vintage delays (like UA’s wonderful EP-34 or Pulsar Audio’s Echorec and such), which get used very often for other things, aren’t chosen for this task.

No, I don’t use any modulation. I don’t like that whirly, slightly nauseous sound. Not in this context anyway. It’s very important, I find, to aim for a barely noticeable and above all natural-sounding presence of space. A listener should never say: “Hey, there’s a short delay on that, isn’t there?” Not good. You don’t want people to hear it, but you’d hear it when you take it out.

There’s two different ways I use delay on brass. The first one is to emulate something I occasionally hear on records too: brass instruments being so brassy, they sometimes trigger much more pronounced early reflections than the other sections of the orchestra do. Well, it’s more than just early reflections, it’s a sort of additional concentration of delays, clearly separated from the source and not yet dissolved in the tail. Percussion triggers these things as well, but adding delay(s) to percussion in a mock-up, even when hardly audible, is always a bit risky, as in: potentially messy, I find. With brass however it often works, to my ears. The idea here is to generate a single, fairly short, blurry cluster of delays and preceding that with whatever amount of predelay fits you spatial illusion.

A great (quite possibly: the best) tool for this is Flux’s IrcamVerb. In fact, that’s where I got the term ‘cluster’ from for this phenomenon. IrcamVerb splits its reverb in three stages: (1) the Early Reflections, (2) the Cluster and (3) the Tail. And the great thing is: you can mute any of these stages and simply work with the one that you need, in our case; the Cluster.

The second way is adding a delay — this time more of a classic ‘echo’ — to brass solos, especially slower ones. It’s not a realistic effect or anything we’re going for here, but it just adds someting which, to my ears, has musical and esthetic value. It is what I always call my “The Hills Are Alive”-trick. As with the other techniques, this one needs to be added extremely subtly too. One of those “the moment you hear it, dial it back a few notches”-things, you know. And when mixed in just right, it somehow increases the soaring or majestic or noble qualities in brass phrases. Not essential, just nice.

I’d love to make some audio examples of all of this, but I’m working on this rather heavy and complex thing in Logic at the moment (with various channels routed to Vienna Ensemble and SPAT Revolution), and I hate to close it before I’m done with it.

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Wow Piet, thank you for that thorough explanation (I second Guy's request, by the way)! Illuminating stuff. I will spend some time with all this this, and Ircam Verb. today and hopefully get a good feel for it all.

I'm glad you managed to get SPAT Revolution working on your system by the way. Gives me hope that when I'm finally feeling masochistic enough to try again, the outcome will be something other than the frustrations of the past.

[Piet De Ridder]

(...) I'm glad you managed to get SPAT Revolution working on your system by the way. Gives me hope that when I'm finally feeling masochistic enough to try again, the outcome will be something other than the frustrations of the past.

Well, the combination LogicPro + SPAT Revolution still isn't a great success, I'm sorry to have to say. I can get it working when I use only one or two sends into SPAT. But no more. The moment I add a third send, SPAT starts giving constant sync errors and producing that crackling, rattling sound that remind me of old fax-machines. I've tried just about everything to solve that problem — changing the frame rate, trying different samplerates, adjusting the buffer sizes, ... — but to no avail. Barely useable, in other words (except if you only have one or two instruments you want to give the SPAT-treatment, like I did with that piano demo of a few days ago).

However, and I don't know why I didn't think of it before, but combining SPAT Revolution with Vienna Ensemble is proving to be rather solid and glitch-free. My latest attempt had 8 instrument tracks being sent into SPAT Revolution and the summed & spatialized stereo signal being sent back into Vienna Ensemble, and neither of the two players gave even the slightest indication that they didn't like what they were asked to do.

Seems to confirm what I've been thinking for quite some time now: SPAT Revolution isn't the problem, LogicPro is.


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[Luciano Storti]

Aha. That is a shame. While I'm happy to hear you've had success with VEPro + SPATRev, I don't own the former, having resisted the temptation of overcomplicating the setup. I might be wrong, of course, but I do like being able to just load up one program/app and getting to it without necessarily having to rely on a template (I use several within Logic, but maintaining another set on another app would prove to be too tedious, I reckon). Still, if that makes SPATRev work, well that's now an even bigger temptation. Although... I do wonder if this could be accomplished in smaller scale via something like Blue Cat Patchworks or Audio Gridder. I also own Bidule. I'll have to try when I have some downtime.

Sync Errors is what I was running into with Logic + SPATRev as well. In my case even with just one instrument. Happy you have a working solution, I know how much weight SPAT carries for you!