Hardware and software units which can introduce extra harmonic content to an instrument or group of tracks is something that emerged on the market in recent decades. Specifically, in the last decade, these types of units got a significant boost in terms of their quality. Today, we have some impressive sounding software units at our disposal. One of these software units which operates uniquely is Vitamin Sonic Enhancer designed by Waves Audio.
Vitamin Sonic Enhancer by Waves Audio
Waves Vitamin is a multiband harmonic enhancer and tone-shaping plugin. It can make any track sound powerful and full of spark by mixing an enriched version with the original signal. What’s more, the controls of Vitamin are intuitive, easy to use and immediately responsive. They enable you to smooth or accentuate punchiness and dynamics, determine the crossover frequency points between the plugin’s five bands, and control the mix of the direct signal with its enhanced version. To top it all off, when Vitamin is in stereo mode, each band has a width control that lets you create wider sound images or make room for a vocal right in front of the mix – a great tool for mastering.
In the next tutorial, I will guide you thru its user interface and demonstrate a couple of audio examples, both on solo tracks and the master channel. We will start as usual by adding an instance of Vitamin on the snare track within SoundBridge: DAW.
The Interface
The Vitamin interface is designed to look a bit like a mixer. So, the central portion of the interface includes sliders which are controlling five adjustable frequency bands. In the upper part, we can see a graphical representation of the frequency band. You can see LO (low), LM (low mid), HM (high mid) and HI (high) bands.
As mentioned above the values in the boxes are adjustable by dragging. Below that we can see the sliders which control the amount of processing you can apply to each band. Furthermore, below this section, there is are five rotation knobs which are controlling the stereo width of each band. The handy feature is the DIRECT slider which controls the amount of the unprocessed signal so that you can mix between unprocessed and processed signal.
The little box in the right side called PUNCH is an embedded transient shaper/compression. You can use it to polish the dynamics of the overall signal further. Besides that, there are INPUt and OUTPUT knobs. Use them to set the correct value of the signal in order to avoid unwanted clipping.
Audio Examples
Since we had a brief introduction of the main features of Vitamin, we can move to the audio examples. We will listen first how the rhythm channel can be altered by it and afterward the master bus. I advise you to use a pair of quality studio headphones od a pair of studio monitors to hear the full effect.
~Rhythm – Unprocessed
~Rhythm – Processed with Vitamin
~Master Channel – Unprocessed
~Master Channel – Processed with Vitamin
