KAUSTHUB RAVI & SIVANESH NATARAJAN
MAKING YOUR MUSIC
PRODUCTION LIFE EASIER
SUGAR - PROCESS AUDIO
Plug - in
everything from a little touch of tube drive to insanely dirty
distortion. Opening up the plug-in for the first time reveals
fairly simple design, with four sliders corresponding to each
of the four frequency bands (low, medium, high and air) –
although there’s no real indication as to where exactly the
crossovers for each band is set.
Under this, each band has two colours, with enigmatic
names: Punch, Warm, Shine and, bizarrely, Yin and Yang. In
this respect, Sugar is reminiscent of Kush Audio tools, such
as the Clariphonic, urging users to use their ears rather than
their eyes to mix. Although this might seem vague to a lot of
first-time users, you quickly become used to the settings and
it allows for some pretty intuitive working methods from
there.
PureMix, a popular online education company founded by
the Grammy winning engineer, Fab Dupont is best known
for its insightful mix tutorials on youtube. The latest foray
for this company is a venture called PROCESS.AUDIO, a
wing dedicated to producing some interesting plugins for the
modern studio environment.
Sugar is an analogue-inspired audio sweetener, bringing
a modern digital approach to the kinds of sounds you’d
expect to hear from an Aphex Aural Exciter processor, or
the old ‘Dolby A trick’ – a processing option which used the
Dolby A noise-reduction encoder to enhance the top end of
a recording, creating a sense of more air and clarity. Sugar
starts with control over four frequency bands, each with
two distinct tonal colour alternatives. Furthermore, Sugar
also has high- and low-pass filtering built-in, as well as a
saturation circuit with drive, distort and crush settings for
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Dialling up any of these four bands dials in the processed
signal. This works in parallel with the dry signal, which is
always present in the output, so your signal level is always
increased by using Sugar. This can be compensated for, with
the output fader, or by using the handy LVL MGMT button,
which automatically brings the fader down as you turn up
each of the frequency bands. We’ve already created our own
default preset for Sugar, which has the LVL MGMT engaged
from the beginning, as it seems likely we’re always going to
process with this engaged.
In the center of the user interface is a single large Wet Inject
dial, with four colour bands emanating out like streamers.
These bands are just another visualisation of the four
frequency bands at the top, but the Wet Inject dial enables
you to control all four bands at once, dialing them all up or
down as if you were controlling them with a VCA. Used with
the LVL MGMT button, this can be very useful for seeing
quite how much or how little is needed to sweeten your
tracks.
On stereo channels, Sugar defaults to apply equal amounts of
processing to the left and right channels, with no dual-mono
option short of using separate left and right instances of the