Scarborough, UK (May 30, 2024)―Chief resident engineer, mixer and producer Chris Jones at Beckview Studios in the north of England opened the facility with his wife, Kristina, the studio manager, in May 2023. Outfitted with a variety of gear, the facility also makes use of various plug-ins.
“The Nugen Audio plug-in that initially caught my eye was Aligner,” Chris Jones says. “It really is such a useful tool and saves me so much time. From that point on, I began incorporating other Nugen solutions into my workflow, and they have all become staples for me. Now, specifically Aligner, is used on just about everything I work on—it’s my favorite.”
Jones adds that one of his main applications for Aligner is when he is working with bass or acoustic guitar. “It comes in handy, especially if I’m running a dual signal and I have a mic signal on the amp. It saves me all that time I would normally spend nudging it around,” he explains. “It’s also great because you can line it up at the start, and then if you’re punching in or doing any overdubs, you’re not trying to manually line up different clips on the grid to attempt to compensate for the difference in phase between the various parts.”
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Similarly, he says he has also used Stereoizer on nearly every project in the studio. “I use Stereoizer to make stereo sources even bigger and give mono sources a bit more width, but what I particularly like about it is that it collapses to mono very well,” he says. “Some of the other plug-ins I’ve used in the past would give a really nice wide image, but when you sum it to mono, you lose a lot of information, whereas with Stereoizer, that’s not the case.”
Jones also uses Nugen’s ISL and Paragon. “What I like to do with the ISL limiter is have it on my master bus, where I can switch it into compact mode,” he explains. “It’s especially nice from a screen real estate view; you can leave it up, see what’s going on, but not have a bunch of unnecessary information that isn’t needed in that moment. As for Paragon, I really like the width function and the fact that you can adjust the crosstalk between the left and right channels. You can almost make it into two mono reverbs and play around with that, which is nice and something I haven’t found in other reverbs. Also, the fact that you can manipulate the parameters and not have the artifacts that come with changing the size, is really valuable.”
