One fairly substantial pain point is how you’re forced to browse presets. In addition to its constituent plugins, Taupe’s main plugin offers all of its sub-modules within one unified interface, which might be better or worse for you depending on your particular workflow. To my ears, many of Tape’s models sit beautifully on an electronic master buss, notably the “Final Countdown” and “Rocky” 30 IPS settings. And when it comes to the natural limiting effect, which many engineers revere analog tape for, Taupe provides it in spades: driving the input hard, pushing the mix knob to 100% wet, and turning off “Econo” mode will, much more often than not, provide a beautiful rounding of transients and up to 6dB of natural, smooth limiting behavior. On drums, Taupe Tape is capable of beefing up the low end in a natural way no EQ can. Tape does an incredible job of adding glue and overall magic to the master buss, particularly on dance, pop, and EDM many of Taupe’s tape models are excellent for removing digital harshness, particularly in the upper mid and high frequencies. Part of what makes Taupe Tape so useful is the range of tape machines and sounds it offers, which by my count stands at 40 (note that in many cases, a machine was sampled at different settings, i.e., 15 and 30ips, which results in 2 models). While I’ve never used the real deal, I have owned or tried just about every tape plugin on the market, and I can confidently say Taupe exceeds every single one of them in terms of sheer flexibility, sound quality, and tonal enhancement.
However, my go-to mastering engineer often prints my mixes using the medium. In the spirit of objectivity, I have to disclose that I’ve never had the good fortune of working on real analog tape. All of the usual suspects, including machines from Ampex, Otari, Studer, and more, are here. While Acustica cannot officially divulge what tape machines they sampled for the plugin, you can easily find a list of the highly likely candidates online, and a quick review of the list reveals a who’s who of legendary tape gear. Opening Tape for the first time reveals an uncluttered, simple interface offering a range of buttons for selecting various tape models, input and output gain controls, a mix knob, and an intuitive frequency spectrum, providing insight into the tonal characteristics of the selected tape model. Knobs are snappy, sound adjustments are instant, and many controls are no longer stepped.įor starters, let’s dive into Taupe’s standout plugin: Taupe Tape. Thankfully, with the release of Acustica’s Core 13 and later technology (which is built-in to Taupe), many of these issues have been entirely or mostly resolved. Additionally, many of Acustica’s analog models were stepped, meaning, for example, an EQ band could only be adjusted to provide specific amounts of gain (e.g., +- 2dB, 4dB, 6dB), rendering them less flexible than many digital counterparts. While it wasn’t always a dealbreaker, it was hardly ideal. Due to the particular nature of Acustica’s analog sampling process, and the large files it produces, you would often turn a knob and then have to wait several seconds for the updated processing to kick in. Older versions of Nebula and Acqua plugins, such as Taupe, sounded stellar but often suffered from clunky and slow user interfaces. Before we dive into the specifics of Taupe, I think it’s again worth noting how much Acustica’s plugins have improved from a usability standpoint in recent years.
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