The name itself is bound to trigger a few notes of recognition. Abbey Road studios is probably the most famous studio in the world. It’s the place where the Beatles and George Martin produced their best work. The rooms and sound of the equipment have become legendary and now much of that fabled recording environment has been captured in the Abbey Road collection of plugins from Waves.
All the plugins in the collection are awesome to have all over your mix but there’s one, in particular, that will give you the same mastering tools that were used on Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, Radiohead’s OK Computer and Ed Sheeran’s + and that’s the TG Mastering Chain.
The TG Mastering Chain is a modular mastering plugin modeled after the EMI TG12410 Transfer Console that has been in use at Abbey Road for nearly 50 years. It contains 5 separate processes arranged in modules. There’s the TG12411 Input, the TG12312 Tone (EQ), the TG12414 Compressor/limiter, TG12414 Filter and TF12416 V.A.L. (stereo spread).
All the modules can be re-arranged and used independently, making it useful during the mixing stage. But it’s when they are used together that they can bring that classic hardware sound to your music productions.
As this is software, it has given the Waves Engineers an opportunity to add some extra options and functionality. The compressor/limiter now has two modes. The Original mode is an exact recreation of the hardware with all the aggression and dirt that we love from 1970s recordings. The new Modern mode retains the feel of the hardware while aiming for a more pristine sound with higher levels of perceived loudness that people seem to like these days.
Personally, I’d buy the whole Abbey Road suite because the quality of the plugins in this collection is breathtaking. But for any sort of mastering of any type of music, the TG Mastering Chain will give you a solid level of vintage quality.
Street Price: $199, currently on a $49 deal price
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