Customer Reviews
-
Perfect for songwriting and demos
★★★★★I have way too many plugins (as I'm sure many of us do), and I generally find having too many quality mixing/mastering-stage plugins to choose from is a distraction during songwriting, arranging, and demo recording. But I also don't like my tracks completely bare, even this early in the process. While I don't typically reach for channel strip plugins, I'd been looking for something that I could slap on my demo template to enliven and shape tracks during these early stages without going down mixing rabbit holes. This plugin is EXCEPTIONAL for this and exceeded my expectations.
It's got saturation with pre-emphasis, basic compression with switchable knee, HP/LP filter, basic 3-band EQ, exciter, mono maker, panning, metering, and output auto-gain. It even has a tuner for guitar, bass, analog synth, etc. It sounds really quite good and characterful, without going overboard. I've put the bx_enhancer on all my demo tracks and a Louder Than Liftoff Silver Bullet mk2 on the master, and it's got all the vivid analog-ish feel I'd want for demos. I would dig deeper into my plugin library for mixing (almost always choosing more modular options than a channel strip), but at every stage before that, I'm quite excited by this.
My one feature request would be to also add auto-gain at the input. I currently stack this with a HoRNet TheNormalizer to get gain-staging into the bx_enhancer set quickly to 0VU (helpful for saturation and compression). To be fair, the bx_enhancement has decent input metering and an input gain knob, so it's not strictly required -- it's just a convenience. Given that bx_enhancer already has auto-gain on output, it seems entirely consistent to also have it on input. -
Something more...
★★★★★I find it extremely effective on drums (kick) and bass to shape the sound. These settings are fine and allow great precision in adjusting the sound
The integrated compressor is a significant plus
A plugin that will become essential...