FabFilter FabFilter Pro-G Review
Gating and expansion are crucial parts of modern music production. Hollin Jones gets to grips with FabFilter’s Pro-G.
Price: £114.00
Manufacturer: FabFilter
Website: http://www.fabfilter.com
Here at Music Tech we are big fans of FabFilter’s plug-ins, both for their great sound and for their interfaces, which make many other plug-ins look tired. The latest offering from the company is the Pro-G, a gate/expander plug-in that comes in all major formats and is compatible with the latest versions of Windows and Mac OS.
Gating was originally developed to get rid of unwanted background noise on recordings when there wasn’t supposed to be any sound. In the days of analogue recording, it wasn’t possible to simply cut out lots of small sections of audio as it is now with digital sound, but even today it remains a tedious process. A gate cuts off all sound below the threshold you set, while expansion uses the attack, knee, release and lookahead settings that you make to quieten down such sections rather than cutting them entirely.
Pro-G can operates in mono, stereo or mid/side modes and provides advanced yet easy-to-use controls for gating audio. After the modest download, you enter your licence key and the subsequent authorisation process is painless.
So how do you use it? Let’s say you have a guitar part with a high noise floor and there’s a lot of ambient noise mixed in with the signal. Pro-G’s real-time metering is able to show you graphically which parts of the signal you want and which parts you don’t. By using the Threshold control you can then dial in a setting that causes Pro-G to reduce the gain whenever the signal falls below that threshold. The result is that the signal is ‘ducked’ whenever there’s a pause in the playing, so that the background noise doesn’t end up on the recording as a whole.
Given that there is often some bleed on live recordings, especially recordings of a whole band, this can be an ideal tool for achieving better separation across a mix. It’s great for vocals, too, as it can be used to cut out breaths and ambient noise during ‘silent’ passages. Ratio and Range controls enable you to fine-tune the way gating is applied.
Expanding upwards
Expansion is the exact opposite of compression: it increases the difference in loudness between quieter and louder sections of audio, making quiet sounds quieter and loud sounds louder. It’s useful when you want to increase the dynamic range of audio: when, for example, you have a noisy recording and want to reduce the volume of the quieter parts so you don’t notice the noise as much. It’s not the same as gating, which cuts audio off completely, but is able to reduce the noise levels more sympathetically.A gate is an expander with a fixed, infinite ratio that silences sound, but an expander has multiple ratios that can be softer. To the right of Pro-G you will find the expander section, with five styles of expansion to suit your material – classic, clean, vocal, guitar and upward expansion. Attack and Release controls to govern the way in which expansion is applied and how quickly it kicks in and releases when the thresholds are crossed. There are also Hold, Knee and Lookahead knobs to control the character of the expansion.
Expert mode
In Expert mode, Pro-G provides even more flexible routing, with external sidechain input available together with completely customisable channel linking and routing. By sidechaining you are able to use an external audio source to set the threshold of the gating or expansion effects, and there’s an Audition button to let you listen only to the sidechain signal, plus filtering to narrow the frequency range on which the effect will trigger. There are also wet and dry knobs, as well as gain, which provide further flexibility. In addition to this you get all the usual FabFilter goodness, such as MIDI Learn, up to four-times linear-phase oversampling, zero-latency operation, undo, redo and A/B’ing, as well as the ability in this case to use MIDI triggering to open the gate/expander with your MIDI keyboard.Pro-G is another invaluable dynamics plug-in from FabFilter. Although gating and expansion are maybe not as ‘glamorous’ as reverb or delay, they are tasks that are commonly used by mixing engineers in everyday production. FabFilter’s slick, innovative interface makes Pro-G a joy to use, with helpful visual feedback as well as tooltips that explain what’s going on. For the more advanced user there is much to like – great sound, zero-latency operation and advanced sidechaining support. For pros and beginners alike, Pro-G is a superb tool. MTM
10/10 Verdict - An excellent plug-in that takes care of the workaday but vital business of gating and expanding. Don’t leave home without it.
WHY BUY
+ Sounds great+ Gorgeous interface
+ Easy to use
+ Powerful and flexible
+ Meters give good visual feedback
+ Easy to achieve good results
WALK ON BY
- Nothing!Score: 10/10
This review first appeared in Music Tech Magazine issue 100
Filed under
Reviews,
Software,
Software Effects
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