Universal Audio plug-in delivers Little Labs bass processing you’ll want to have

UAD has just released the $149 plug-in modeled on Little Labs 500-series lunchbox module. It makes mixing the low-end of your recordings a breeze at a small price.

Little Labs created the simple VOG to modulate the proximity effect on male voice. It didn’t take recording engineers long to start using it for cleaning up electric bass and kick drum tracks.

Mercenary Audio demo of VOG proximity effect

Like Jonathan says in the video, if you have a singer with a thin voice it can bring the “balls out of ‘er'”.

Jonathan Little explains the VOG

The low-end of mixes

Little Labs VOG 500-series lunchbox

Without properly EQ’d and compressed bass, songs sound flat. This is a real challenge when most of your listeners are using cheap headphones with an MP3 player. Songs mixed for detail in the low-end get lost. You have to find the peak resonance for the kick drum and bass and pump them up without increasing the low-end mud.

VOG separates and emphasizes the bass from the kick drum, giving them both their own space by picking two different resonant points.

Engineers have done it for years but nothing does it slicker than the VOG. Three buttons and two knobs – that’s it. You dial in the peak resonance and then decide how much to enhance it. Listening is the best way to use it.

With such a simple tool, it’s easy to quickly check the mix on headphones, on an iPhone, the car speakers and whatever you use to confirm your mixes.

I tried the UA VOG plug-in on everything I’ve mixed in the past year. Only standup bass seemed impervious to the instant improvement. Kick drums just jumped up in the mix. Bass got cleaner and more pronounced. Upright bass took a little longer to find the sweet spot since the bass was more resonant and the harmonics richer.

Feedback and reviews

The consensus on Gearslutz is that the Little Labs VOG is something you’ll want to order two.

Matt Houghton said in Sound on Sound “The VOG is incredibly easy to use. I tested it on sources including kick drum, bass guitar and some drum loops, as well as on my voice. It certainly lived up to its name, easily bringing out the deep, chest resonances in my voice. I’d be perfectly happy using proximity bass boost coupled with a high-pass filter to do a similar job, but the VOG makes that particular effect very easy to do without you having to worry about the mic.”

VOG 500-series lunchbox module

Mercenary Audio carries the Little Labs VOG for $400 per module.

It’s also available from Amazon.com for about the same price.

UA plug-in

Universal Audio just released their VOG modeled plug-in which I tested.

I can’t say if it is better or worse than the outboard lunchbox but it seems to work wonderfully.

UAD plug-ins have an excellent reputation for producing the same or almost the same effect as the outboard processor.

The best part for owners of the UAD-2 card is that the plug-in costs $149. The same plug-in can be used on multiple tracks which is the advantage of UAD.

To use the VOG on bass, drums and vocals you need three lunchbox modules at $1,200 plus the real estate on the mixing desk. As long as the UAD card doesn’t max out, you can have as many instances of the plug-in as your DAW can handle.

The VOG plug-in put no stress on my UAD-2 Quad cards unlike the Studer A800  or Manley Massive Passive which can choke the UAD-2 if I’m not careful.

UAD-2 is a PCIe or FireWire processor card that offloads digital audio plugins from the computer’s CPU.  Each card has one, two or four processor chips that carry out the audio processing. They were created when computers weren’t as powerful as they are today.

Some people say the UAD-2 is out of date but I don’t subscribe to that. I can add more effects on more tracks with UAD-2 cards without locking up the computer than I can with native plug-ins. However, there are people who swear by both types of plug-ins. UAD-2 plug-ins don’t need an iLok dongle.