Desk Drive - direct-to-desk inspired medium gain

Description

This is a direct-to-desk inspired medium-gain tone that I put together for my own use, but I thought others might find it interesting too. It’s based on an old studio technique where the guitar is plugged straight into a mixing desk, with the channel gain cranked up for intentional clipping. The tone is fuzzy but punchy when you dig in, and it cleans up well for quieter playing. It was made with a long chain of plugins, mostly emulations of '60s and '70s studio gear, that subtly clip and shape the sound in layers. There’s no amp or speaker simulation, but the tone is meant to be used without an IR. Chain: 1 - Fabfilter Pro-MB and Pro-L2 compression/limiting - loud peaks and harshness handling 2 - Fabfilter Pro-Q3 high pass EQ - removing useless rumble 3 - Fabfilter Pro-Q3 mid emphasis bell EQ (works together with no. 6) 4 - Soundtoys Echoboy used 100% wet, no feedback, for tape overdrive only. The delay itself was later undone by re-aligning the output file. 5 - Fabfilter Pro-L2 Subtle limiter, with a few dB of added output reduction too to compensate for the volume boost of the previous stages 6 - Fabfilter Pro-Q3 mid de-emphasis bell EQ (works together with no. 3) 7 - Soundtoys Sie-Q - emulation of a vintage 3 band EQ with shelving EQs and parametric mids, that overdrives nicely too. Adding lows, highs and drive 8 - Soundtoys Little Radiator, adding subtle tube emulation in parallel 9 - Soundtoys Sie-Q, cutting bass and adding highs and drive 10 - Fabfilter Pro-Q3 removing some super low and high frequencies, and dipping the low mids, and lowering output volume 11 - Soundtoys Sie-Q, boosting lots of lows and highs, adding some drive 12 - Pro-Q3 for some shaping and volume cut 13 - Stillwell Event Horizon soft clipper/ limiter (set subtly) to soften peaks and manage level 14 - Soundtoys Radiator - adding some scooped-mid, full bass dirt in parallel 15 - Two Notes Genome TSM power amp modeler, EL34 push-pull, with some added depth 16 - Soundtoys Sie-Q, adding treble whil cutting high mids, cuttin lows, adding drive 17 - Fabfilter Pro Q3- tucking in some harshness 18 - UA LA-2 Compressor - adding warmth and smoothness

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