Some time last week, in the lull after NAMM, Nomad Factory & Don’t Crack announced that they would be partnering to give away their Bus Driver as a free plugin for a limited time. While no official end date has been decided, we don’t recommend sleeping on this one. The Bus Driver is a cross between a tube driver saturation effect and the classic 1176 & LA2A compressors. The official product page includes the following description:
Bus Driver is an optical compressor that provides a wide range of compression effects, reminiscent of the best vintage compressors made in the ‘60s.
Compression is one of those studio processes that is all too often taken for granted and not usually used to its full potential. Today’s producers think nothing of inserting compressors on every single channel of their DAW when mixing, but old school engineers had to learn to make the most of only a few units of compression and this made them learn them inside out to use them to their best advantage. Bus Driver is modeled on the classics from the ‘golden age’ of tube compressors.
Also included in Bus Driver is a Tube-Driver Saturation feature. It allows you to add the sound of a vintage tube amplifier giving you the differing electronic characteristics of triode, tetrode, and pentode vacuum tubes. So you can add the vintage warmth of the those models of the classic tubes (e.g. ECC83, 12AX7, etc..) to your tracks or on your mix bus.
Nomad Factory designed an Output Stage Soft-Clipping to eliminate digital clipping at any output level and produce a smoother distortion characteristic. This feature is in addition to the Tube-Driver Saturation Modeling included in Bus-Driver.
Free Plugin Instructions:
To get your free plugin, head on over to Don’t Crack’s product page and enter voucher code “freebusdriver” at checkout. Be sure to let us know what you’re thinking about it in the comments below, or on our Facebook page.